Some Psychodynamics of Orality

For most of our human history, storytelling was oral. Myths were spoken or sung by diverse storytellers who could select and modulate their narrative to best suit a given audience, emphasizing some aspects and ignoring others.

Later, media theorist Walter Ong articulated the profound differences between Textual (Literate) and Oral cultures. Textual cultures are abstract, analytical, mathematical, clinical, universalist. Oral cultures are grounded, intuitive, emotional, interpersonal, group oriented.

o, secondary orality is “essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality,”[20] according to him. Writing and print, on which this orality depends, have left their marks on it.

Through linguistic offshoots, such as writing, we are able to practice a unique phenomenon: exbodiment , in which byproducts of our cognition can be captured, stored, shared, and passed through generations.

As the Mysteries faded, the phonetic alphabet helped move consciousness toward a world emphasizing spoken and written language and away from the world of a gestalt pictographic awareness. These developments reinforced the emergence of the antivisionary dominator style of culture. The dark night of the planetary soul that we call Western civilizatio

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