Much of the indigenous wisdom of the world is preserved in stories. Like seeds enduring for years under layers of dark earth, cultural answers to questions such as how to survive the winter, how to heal the sick, and how to relate to the unseen are all contained in the vivid, easily-remembered narratives which storytellers carry in their voices. The worshippers of Poseidon remain alive inside the Iliad, offering wine to the sea; the wise women of Europe, killed in the Inquisition, still sing inside the story known to us as “Sleeping Beauty.” Just as every species on earth—whether tiger, rat, virus or pine tree—is a different answer to the question of how to live, so every story offers us another possibility for human life, another way of being in the world. And these insights come to us not just from cultures distant from us in space, but distant from us in time as well. How old are the stories we tell? Many of the modern stories created by the film industry go back only about a century, but stories originating in oral cultures are far older. The Odyssey was written down about 800 B.C.E., after being told aloud for perhaps hundreds of years; the Epic of Gilgamesh is preserved on the shattered pieces of clay tablets inscribed in Mesopotamia about 5,000 years ago. Many fairy tales—among them “Cinderella,” “Red Riding Hood,” and “The Blacksmith and the Devil”—are estimated by linguists to be at least 2,000 years old. Yet these numbers only hint at what oral memory is capable of.
But recent astronomical observations have shed some light on this question. For it turns out that in the past an additional star, located far from the others, was part of the larger group. If this star is in fact the seventh sister it has “wandered away” just as many of the stories describe. Astronomers have measured the speed of the star’s movement through the night sky, and have calculated that this star was a part of the larger group approximately 100,000 years ago. If this is the case then the stories of the Seven Sisters contain astronomical knowledge which has been preserved for approximately one thousand centuries. One thousand centuries is a long time. It’s long enough for the Egyptian pyramids to be reduced to bare sand, long enough for successive sheets of ice to grind over the earth and then retreat again, destroying everything beneath them. Very few of the creations of human beings can survive for that long without a large amount of luck. Yet oral memory can cross such distances, for there are examples from all over the world of myths and stories which preserve information that is astonishingly old, whether it is a flood in ancient Mesopotamia, a prehistoric eruption in New Zealand, or an earthquake in Indonesia. If you want an event to be remembered for a long time, your best bet is not a granite slab, a clay tablet, or your hard drive, but a good story. Yet it is dangerous to treat a traditional story as a kind of museum. For these stories are most useful to us not as windows into the past, but into the present. Just as each wheel of your car is both an expression of an ancient pattern and a way to get where you are going, so too traditional stories survive today not because they are ancient but because they are useful. We see with them, for the patterns they describe are all around us. These stories contain possibilities, capacities latent in us that are as possible now as they were in the past.
For to tell a traditional story is to commune with voices unknown to you, and to take your place—consciously or not—in a lineage of strangers united in their relation to a common mystery. When such a story is told time passes differently, and everyone in the room listens in a new way. It may feel as though unexpected beings are about to arrive; it may feel as if voices long ignored are beginning to speak, offering answers to questions you forgot you even had. Somewhere there is a group of men and women chanting around a fire. They’ve been chanting all night, waiting for you to join them. Why would you walk away?
You can find the astronomical paper which informed this essay here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/np0n4v72bdl37gr/sevensisters.pdf?dl=0
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When I was twelve years old, Hitler was elected president of my summer camp. We were playing a game, what the counselors had told us was a “political simulation.” It took place in an imaginary country called Strawberryland, and during the game we elected leaders, bought snacks, and earned play money by doing small chores. There were political parties, elections, and leaders who campaigned for our votes. We listened to their speeches, voted, and saw the snacks change from cheap popcorn to expensive chocolate cake depending on who was elected. As the game went on things began to change more decisively. Finally there was no work to be had, all the play money went out of circulation, and a bearded counselor from “the Red Party” started waving a toy sword and giving speeches in which he promised to “Make Strawberryland great again.” It was then that some of us had a realization: we were being tricked. This game wasn’t about Strawberryland but about pre-war Germany, and was in fact a test by the counselors to see if we were smart enough to avoid electing Hitler or not. We were excited that we had figured this out, and felt powerful: we were smarter than the counselors! So we began telling our new insight to everyone who would listen. By this time, however, it was late in the game, darkness had set in, and crowds of boys were walking around chanting “Red party! Red party!” Whether or not we had figured out the “real” story didn’t matter anymore: the supporters of the Red Party had signs, momentum, and a chant. We were no match for them. As we tried to get everyone to snap out of it the giddiness of that moment began to slide into something darker, as though we were all at sea and subject to a current too powerful for any of us to resist. There was one last election, but the results went unannounced. Then the game ended and we all walked on a path through the forest—crickets making shimmering music around us, stars overhead—and gathered around a campfire. The bearded candidate from the Red Party stood up with his arms outstretched. “I am your new leader!” he shouted. The crowd cheered. And then another counselor, in apologetic tones, told us that the game had been a simulation of pre-war Germany. Shock and silence settled in, and a few in the crowd began to weep.
Not long ago I told a Norse myth to children at a public library. I began by explaining to them the cosmos of Nordic mythology, describing to them the various gods of that world. Right away a six-year-old girl’s hand shot up, and when I called on her she confidently informed me that “There’s only one God.” I gave a less-than-perfect response, saying that “Back then,” people believed in more than one god. Without spelling it out in so many words, I essentially told her that the story was a relic, a dead thing from an age and a culture less enlightened than our own. Some minutes later, however, we came to one of the climactic moments of the story, when a frost giant takes the form of a golden eagle so as to steal the apples of immortality from the gods. As the eagle took flight I gave a shout and pointed to the corner of the room, and was amazed to find that, yes indeed, a golden eagle was perched right there. Not an actual eagle, but the golden eagle that is at the top of every American classroom flagpole. It was a small room and the flag had been there the whole time, but I hadn’t noticed it. This felt to me like a word spoken back to me by the story, a kind of reply. For I had insulted the story by calling it a relic from the past, and here it had responded by saying “Look buddy, there are big dumb violent frost giants all over the place, greedy for power and desperate to live forever, and your federal government might just be one of them.”
That story--You are oppressed by an evil empire, and I will destroy it—has felt true to me at various times as well. I felt it keenly when I was a shy adolescent, sweating my way through public school. But it felt true to me in my twenties also, when I worked as an environmental activist going door-to-door in the suburbs of Minneapolis; and it made sense to me in my thirties, when I moved to New York City to study poetry and earned my rent by working in midtown Manhattan. (I still remember the view out those high office windows: steel and glass, power without imagination, a world run by frost giants.) In each of these situations that story helped me to understand both myself and my surroundings. But that story is only one of many. Just as in that long-ago game at summer camp, it turns out that there is more than one story: other options are possible.
Humans think with stories, whether we are looking at deer tracks in the snow, numbers on a graph, or people in the street. Stories are the maps we use to navigate the world around us. For this reason an education in the traditional stories of the world is also an education in possibility. Because no story is the only story, and to know that is to rattle the door of whatever room it is that holds you, making it possible to someday open that door and take one furiously wild step into the forest outside. |
Jay Leeming is a performance storyteller, poet, and musician adept at bringing ancient myths and stories alive through
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