Narrative Logo - Click for Main Menu Lecture IV: The Origins of Tales
Explaining the Unknown and Unseen
You have been reading from two texts, Harris' Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches and now have started Dr. Krupp's Echoes of the Ancient Skies. These authors have different approaches to the origin of folklore. Harris argues that societies discover, either by accident or through evolution, behaviors that contribute to survival; they then enshrine these practices in ritual and story. Krupp believes that ancient people all had access to the sky, a universal phenomenon, and they made up different kinds of stories to explain the movements of the stars and planets. In a sense, we do not have to take sides - nor will we - as we explore these theories of folkstock. None of the theories is mutually exclusive, and it is easy to imagine that ancient people, like ourselves, might develop their myths and folklore as the result of a variety of impulses. We have seen, for example, the role of Osiris as the Green Man, a god of fertility and rebirth. Krupp locates Osiris in the sky, a figure of the moon, and of Orion. His analysis focuses on a different set of details, the 70-day period of embalming that corresponds with the disappearance of Orion in the night sky, the 28 days that correspond to the phase of the moon, etc. We also have looked at what happens to ancient lore as it changes through time and cultures. One of the most interesting things about Krupp is that his research shows the way specific information gets lost or jumbled in the retelling. Today, we know so little about the stars (we scarcely ever see them in some urban areas) that we are likely to miss the important information that would suggest the original meaning of the narrative. And, in the way that our judgment of values changes across cultures, we relegate knowledge of the heavens to kooks and wizards.
I have assigned Echoes of the Ancient Skies because it is chronologically an early work of Krupp. He has another text, listed in your resources, that is more directly concerned with the relationship of the skies to folklore - Beyond the Blue Horizon--Myths and Legends of the Sun, Moon, Stars, and Planets. I recommend it to you for further study on this topic. Krupp's research continually points out that the ancients were interested in the sky because it seemed to them to hold the key to the mysteries of chaos and order. The Greek word cosmos meant "ordered whole" - and Krupp shows us that the effort to describe the sky was akin to the project of demonstrating the order of the deity. But these ideas do not disappear, even in our most humble folklore. The earliest nursery rhymes we learn are often ones that tell us to wake up with the sun and go to sleep when it is dark. Also, the conflict between order and chaos is at the center of narrative, itself. Our experience of the world is often chaotic, we have the experience but miss the meaning. In story, we have a chance to impose order on experience, make meaning of it, and so create a pattern, a greater predictability in the world.
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