The Written Word

Once written down, epic tales can become a fixed narrative of events that people take literally

once oral stories become written literature, we no longer have to rely on speculation.

Unlike factual text or legal documents, which benefit from being inscribed, a story once written down — even one rich in analogy and metaphor that holds within it multiple levels of meaning — can, over time, become believed to be literally true, offer “right” or “wrong” answers, and stipulate ways of thinking or belief as well as modes of behavior,... See more

whenever societies develop writing, oral storytelling initially intersects with writing technologies to produce foundational texts.

Transcendence of ordinary consciousness is not this kind of belief but a discovery and a development inside our minds of a different kind of knowledge. It is not intellectual or emotional, either, but the development of a conscious insight.

The intersection of oral and written storytelling happened first in Mesopotamia around 5,000 years ago, about 2,500 years before Homer was first written down. Originally, scribes used this new technology only for bookkeeping, recording inventory, or for the equivalent of today’s text messages. But once the first scribes in Ur realized that writing ... See more

when we are familiar with an open-ended story, it can, in a sense, remain with us, providing a different, richer understanding and worldview as we experience life and encounter events of a similar structure.