On the Origin of Stories

In his book On the Origin of Stories, Brian Boyd suggests the beginning of art and storytelling developed as a biological adaptation, an evolution through natural selection. Imagine a father cajoling his crying infant son into laughter by imitating a great ape, grunting and shuffling around on his knuckles, pounding on his chest with authority. The son laughs, and the fellow tribesman that have gathered around to watch are laughing also. The father has created a sort of play, demonstrating the first spark of imagination. It is not just the mimicry of a different species which makes it so, it is the added awareness that there is humor in it.

            I admit a lot of his argument is sound, but as I read, I felt something was unaccounted for in his theory; some magical aspect behind art and the imagination that he was failing to put into words. I’m not sure it can be put into words. I felt he was right—art was born when the imagination was born. But I feel that it is more than simply built into us and accessible, rather something within ourselves as early humans that had to be discovered and unlocked. As I read Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth, I felt he captured that illusive side of art better. He suggests human imagination, which of course is the cornerstone of myth and storytelling, came about with the fear of death. Our early ancestors may have acted like animals in the way they dealt with death, thinking nothing of a family member dying, except the interesting fact that they were no longer moving. Perhaps they left them where they lay to rot, and went about their day hunting and gathering, not thinking any further into the matter.

But, as Campbell says, “The earliest evidence of anything like mythological thinking is associated with graves” (The Power of Myth, 89). A drastic transition occurred once the Neanderthal peoples began to mourn their friend’s deaths and fear their own. They began to believe their souls live on in another place and began to bury their dead with weapons, jewelry and sacrifices for their journey to that unseen place. A belief in the unknown was born, which is the first step onto the path of wisdom. Campbell says: “I would say that is the basic theme of all mythology—that there is an invisible plane supporting the visible one” (The Power of Myth, 90). A new consciousness was born then, the imagination that lead to myths.

Hand in hand with the developing reverence for life, the mourning of loved ones, and the belief of an invisible existence, was the respect for the animals they killed, the belief that the souls of the animals also live on past death. Seeing the magical side of life naturally leads to seeing the divine in all things, and finding harmony for our souls in those things. Across all cultures this respect developed into rites and rituals performed upon the beginning of the hunt and upon killing an animal, and these rites vary across cultures and the world. Many early cultures viewed their main source of life as having mystical powers, offering prayers and sacrifice to the great spirit of their main hunting animal—the buffalo for Native Americans, the antelope for South Africa, the great salmon runs for the people of the Northwest. It was the recognition of a force out there that gives and takes away, and if they angered those powers, there would be no food for them. These beliefs developed into myths, and it was the power of the myth that saved them from the guilt of killing animals, which many of the cultures believed to have more power and wisdom than themselves. The myths served to pay tribute to the natural order of nature and the cyclical pattern of life. We kill the animals and live because of it, and when we die our bodies feed the earth, that in turn feed the animals—the circle of life.   

Art evolved with the evolving beauty of our own souls, and is an expression of that beauty. Boyd goes on to talk of the famous ancient cave paintings in terms of human beings depicting the animals in the world around them, and I continued to feel let down as I read. Something was missing, and it went far beyond mimicry. The way the artists used the bulges and crevices of the rock to emphasize certain parts of the animal, such as a hoof or a horn, puts into the paintings a piece of the artists own soul, his own interpretation of that animal. Not just a representation. In some of the paintings I looked at, the animals seem to bound across the sky, as if across the invisible plain, as if the sky and the ground are the same and they are etching themselves into eternity. I wonder looking at them, just the pictures of them, seeing their astounding beauty: is it an expression of the artist’s soul, an expression of the animals, or both intertwined? Is life beautiful on its own, or do we have to make it that way?

The painted caves were much more than a place for those early peoples to try their hand at representative painting. Just getting into many of the caves is a feat of itself, then to paint by the weak light of a flickering torch is a whole different matter. Why not dabble on a rock easier to get to? Because the paintings would not be preserved for 50,000 years. Those ancient artists were sending a message, creating something sacred and welding it into the gears of time. All of humanity is written into a story; through these paintings we may turn its pages. Campbell calls them “temple caves,” explaining so:

A temple is a landscape of the soul. When you walk into a cathedral, you move into a world of spiritual images. It is the mother womb of your spiritual life—mother church. All the forms around are significant of spiritual value. Now, in a cathedral, the imagery is in anthropomorphic form. God and Jesus and the saints and all are in human form. And in the caves the images are in animal form. But it’s the same thing, believe me. The form is secondary. The message is what is important… The message of the caves is of a relationship of time to eternal powers that is somehow to be experienced in that place. (The Power of Myth, 101)

            These ancient peoples were in a sense creating a story from the world they lived in. All they had back then was nature—there was no blaring of horns or internet or buildings blotting out the sun. The sharp mountains biting the sky, those were their buildings. The animals were their neighbors. In the simple things they saw the divine, and they had no science to explain to them the mysteries of the earth. You could say imagination buzzed through the air like a current. These people were closer to that whispering soul of the earth, that still, quiet side where time becomes insignificant in the shadow of eternity. The world to them was a myth, the trees and ocean all figments of their imagination.

So they decided to record, somehow, and pay tribute to the mighty animal spirits that danced in the stars and flew in the breeze. They crushed their roots and flower petals for dye, added the fat of animals , and crawled into the caves like prophets holding torches aloft. These people were writing on the rock walls the world’s first stories, telling their version of the infinite tale. Joseph Campbell says, “Realizing how this moment of your life is actually a moment of eternity, and experiencing the eternal aspect of what you’re doing in the temporal experience—this is the mythological experience” (The Power of Myth, 111). The myths of our ancestors were built upon their own experience of the world, designed to lead their souls through the labyrinth of life. They are myths to us but reality to them. If we could go back in time, they would think us a myth, our clothing and the ideas we had on the way the world worked. Or they would think we were Gods. To me, they were the true scientists, for the only reality we know is one that is made up. We only know what we ourselves have come up with. We know the laws of physics and how they work, but no one can say for sure why they work that way. Astronomers estimate there could be as many as one hundred billion galaxies in our universe, and ideas in astrophysics suggest there could be an infinite amount of universes strewn out across an infinite space, each containing hundreds of billions of galaxies, and each separate universe possibly containing its own laws of physics. The universe could very well be contained with a grain of sand, and we may also just be a grain of sand upon a vast tropical beach.  

The idea behind myth is that this vastness is contained with our souls, each and every one of us. We possess the torch of freedom and the power of creation, our souls are written into the book of eternity. The mind can wander off from the harmony of our soul, the same harmony that is in nature. The myths they created were a means to keep the mind on the same path that nature follows, and to live life as nature would have it lived. This attitude can be found in most Romantic literature, once the hero ascends from whatever depths he has fallen into. It is what we strive in vain for today, in the vast confusion of modern society. There is a place we can go to find it, however. Just open a book, and step into eternity.