Part Two in the first season of Stories from the Hearth's bonus historical and interview series: The Wandering Bard. Each season of The Wandering Bard examines a different aspect of the history and nature of storytelling, as well as people behind it. In season one of The Wandering Bard, we ask the question “Why do we tell stories?”, and in today's episode, we examine how storytelling forms the backbone of culture, and how through our stories we help to create, preserve, and challenge our various cultural understandings.
Part Two in the first season of Stories from the Hearth's bonus historical and interview series: The Wandering Bard. Each season of The Wandering Bard examines a different aspect of the history and nature of storytelling, as well as people behind it. In season one of The Wandering Bard, we ask the question “Why do we tell stories?”, and in today's episode, we examine how storytelling forms the backbone of culture, and how through our stories we help to create, preserve, and challenge our various cultural understandings.
In the next instalment of The Wandering Bard, we will be looking at the kind of lessons we pass down through our stories - from the ethical and moral, to the practical.
Stories from the Hearth is an experimental storytelling experience ft. truly original fiction and thoughtfully produced soundscapes. The aim of this podcast is to rekindle its listeners' love for the ancient art of storytelling (and story-listening), and to bring some small escapism to the frantic energies of the modern world. Stories from the Hearth is the brainchild of queer punk poet, environmentalist, and anarchist Cal Bannerman. Vive l'art!
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Welcome to The Wandering Bard, a bonus historical and interview series on Stories from the Hearth. In Season One, we ask the question “Why do we tell stories?” Today, in Part One, we will be examining how humanity has told stories throughout its history, as a means to making some sense of the world around us. In contrast to the main focus of this podcast – the monthly fiction episodes through which I can experiment with my creativity – The Wandering Bard is the place where I get to indulge my other vice: history. I am a student of history, and think that it may just be one of the most important areas of study out there. After all, everything we do, everything we are, everything we aspire to be as a human species, all of it is contained within the vial of history. Studying history, therefore, is the best means of studying ourselves. In this bonus series, I’ll be presenting short, ten to twenty minute episodes on the history of storytelling in culture, society, religion and art, as well as the history of the people behind it. Occasionally, I’ll even sit down for a chat with another storyteller spinning yarns in the universe today. Episodes of The Wandering Bard will pop-up from time to time. If I can produce one a month, I’ll do so, but you’ll have to forgive me if their publishing schedule is a little more erratic. After all, this is a one woman show, and I’ve got stories to tell! If you’re enjoying this podcast, then please do tell your friends and review it on your favourite podcast app, Spotify, or iTunes. If you’re really enjoying it, then you can support Stories from the Hearth on Patreon and help yourself to early access, behind-the-scenes insights, bonus content, physical copies of the stories, shout-outs and much much more. Just head to patreon.com/storiesfromthehearthpodcast or hit the link down below.
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The stories we grow up with – the fairy tales, fables, cautionary stories, myths, satires, and historical yarns which our families and friends impart on us – tend to address the most important questions in our society. In other words, depending on where you are born, the stories which surround you as you grow will tell you a lot about the various values, beliefs, and lessons which your culture holds to be both dear and true.
These stories reveal to us the central worldview of our culture, and as such, they provide a framework in (or against) which we can build both our cultural and individual identities. Whether you adhere to the stories as gospel, or rebel against them as being in conflict with your being, still, those stories of your culture tend to shape you.
Given the immense power of stories, and the importance of storytelling as both the creator and protector of culture, the role of storyteller, bard, chronicler is historically a revered one. From medicine men in Native American societies, to the griots of West Africa, or seanchaí of Celtic Ireland and Scotland, those who told stories – sometimes a role inherited generation after generation, sometimes formally taught in schools, sometimes earned through natural talent for oration and memory – were respected and highly-specialised artisans, who both created and preserved their cultures, through song, art, dance, and story.
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The most basic form of all cultural storytelling is surely the creation myth. A creation myth – of which there are several distinct, yet little altered forms – is, quite simply, the story which tells of how a particular culture’s universe, earth, land, and people came into being, or were created. These myths form the basis of our worldview, and can help guide us in how we relate to the natural world, to the spiritual world, and to each other.
For example, the Maya of Central America would tell the story of how their gods went about attempting to create humans out of various substances, including wood and clay. However, once animated, the gods discovered that these humans had no soul. Thus, they tried again, this time constructing humans from maize. Maize, as you may well know, formed the backbone of the Mesoamerican and Maya diet (and continues to fuel much of Central and Southern America to this day). Thus, the Maya Creation Myth puts at its very heart – at the core of humanity – corn, or the maize plant, signifying to all those born into this culture the importance of preserving and producing said crop.
The Hopi of North America tell of their people’s long journey from the First World, through the Second and Third, and finally to the Fourth (and current) world. This journey follows the Hopi from their beginning as insects in the First World, through much tumult as wolves and bears in the Second, wicked people in the Third, and finally, led by Spider Grandmother (or kept safe by her during a Great Flood) emerged into the Fourth World as peace-loving peoples who were to embark on great migratory journeys, before finally coming to rest in their native lands in today’s Four Corners region of the United States, comprising south-eastern Utah, north-eastern Arizona, north-western New Mexico, and south-western Colorado. This creation myth teaches Hopi children not only of their intimate connection to all living things, but also of the great migrations and divergences which their ancestors had to endure, before finally this disparate people could converge and settle once again.
In Chinese mythology, the basic element of creation was qi (or breath, air, and life force), which in later Daoism became otherwise known as The Way. The Way was the manifestation of an eternal duality – that between yin and yang, between the binaries of male and female. To this day, the balance of yin and yang remains central to much Chinese and East Asian thinking. Contrary to the typically western belief systems which advocate for the triumph of ‘good’ over ‘evil’, the idea of balance which qi and The Way infer as core to the universe, strives for a concord between all binaries and dualities, rather than the imbalance which the triumph of one over another would affect. I, myself, though irreligious, tend to lean toward the Daoist way of thinking about the world – an interesting thought, given that Daoism is far removed from my own cultural upbringing. But we’ll touch on this again later.
Though I could speak at length about creation myths (for there are almost infinite varieties), I’ll make only a couple more observations. Firstly, it should be noted as a point of interest that many Creation Myths, from all around the world, include some sort of great deluge, or flood as a foundational element – think the Biblical flood of Noah’s Ark as a recent example, or the flood from which the Sumerians emerged, as a more ancient example. Typically, these myths include the survival of the ‘good’ or ‘righteous’ people and animals through the flood, which typically either was sent by a wrathful god, or is the water from which Earth first emerged. I find it interesting that so many cultures make note of a great flood. This could tell us a lot about the core of much human culture and understanding – that we understand rain and water as being fundamental to life, that we understand instinctually that life first emerged from the oceans (as is prevailing scientific theory), or that perhaps these stories are rooted in the many historic great floods which have effected the Earth, throughout human history.
One final note on creation myths. Those in which a single creator exists, tend to style that creator as male, and in turn lend themselves to the formation of patriarchal cultures. Whereas ‘emergence’ myths, in which life emerges from the womb of an earth mother, typically lend themselves to the formation of matriarchal cultures. Further evidence that stories are integral to how our culture’s develop and grow.
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But aside from creation myths, stories also record the history and geography of a people – understandable given the importance of both to one’s understanding of individual and social identity. Thanks to storytelling, these elements then become core elements of the given culture.
For example, in my native hometown of Hawick, in the rolling green hills of southern Scotland’s borderlands, we remember through the stories we tell and learn at school and at play, how the Scottish Borders were for hundreds of years disputed between the two neighbouring kingdoms of Scotland and England. We remember in our tales the violence and turmoil, and the methods we Border folk had to resort to in order to survive – namely ‘reiving’: the practice of stealing and trading cattle in moonlit, nightly horseback raids on neighbouring families, or across the border into English lands. We remember how hardy our ancestors had to be (including the many prominent names of the most powerful reiving families), and why horse-riding remains such an important part of our culture – each year a horseback festival commemorates this once-crucial element of Border life.
As another example, take the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, whose cultures go back some 50,000 years on mainland Australia and in the Torres Strait, tell stories which recall the various geologies of Australian ecosystems now no longer visible. Whilst it may have seemed to outsiders that the stories of the Indigenous Australians were fanciful, recalling territories and landscapes which had never been, scientific study and archaeological research have since proved that many of these Aboriginal stories accurately depict and detail geologies which existed some 10,000 years ago. For a group of peoples who until recently depended entirely upon the land – and a harsh, arid land at that – for their survival, this inherited ancestral knowledge must have been crucial.
Storytelling preserves not only the morals of cultures, but their histories and geographies, too.
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I mentioned earlier the affinity I feel toward Daoist Asian thinking – that the strive toward balance is perhaps not only the best means of living, but the most accurate representation of the true fabric of the universe, and of reality. And yet, this was not the cultural teachings I was brought up with. Though introduced into an increasingly globalised world, I was still born before the widespread introduction of the mobile telephone, and at the very dawn of dial-up internet. As such, the stories which surrounded me were those passed down to me from my grandparents and great-grandparents. They were, generally speaking, Scottish and English in origin. The creation myths were either that of general scientific understanding, or of the Christian God – of amorality, or of ‘Good’ versus ‘Evil’. So how did I come to entertain values held by people half a world away?
Until very recently, a culture was by definition as well as practice, a distinct, often racially consistent group of people, who tended to live close together. They shared physical characteristics, a language, and a mythology, which tended not to change much from generation to generation. And this was the case, it would appear, for about 99% of human history.
But then, quite suddenly, came the industrial and technological revolutions of the 19th-21st centuries. Suddenly, our communities exploded, and our cultural boundaries dissolved. International travel, never mind just travel between villages, became affordable, fast, and safe. People migrated halfway around the world who had never left their hamlet before (think of the Scottish High- and Lowland Clearances, when crofters were forcibly removed from their land and forced to emigrate en masse to New Zealand, Australia, America, and Canada). Cultures began to mix which had never even considered the existence of each other – a prime example being the so-called cultural ‘melting pot’ of New York City: the port of arrival for so many global émigrés. Languages were exchanged, mashed together, transformed. Stories were exchanged too, and the same thing happened.
During the tortuous centuries of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, members of, say, the West African Igbo tribe, might find themselves forcibly relocated to the West Indies, Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, South America, or the United States, and on each occasion, that same originating culture would be changed and mixed and remixed and preserved and altered, until it had helped shape the emergence of hundreds of new cultures all over the world.
Thanks to the technological revolution, which even over my short lifetime has seen most everyone on Earth granted ready, if not always free access to communication networks through which they can talk with, and share ideas and stories with just about anyone else on the planet. As such, we are now able to tell stories which help to construct, define, and preserve cultures free from those earlier constraints: of race, sexuality, gender, and religion. I myself am a proud, self-identified member of two such cultures, namely: Punk culture and Queer culture.
Let’s look at Punk. The ability in the late 20th century for people to tell their stories, and perhaps more importantly, to preserve and export their stories through photographs and vinyl records, allowed for the punk movement to grow fluidly between the USA and Europe, before spreading across the rest of the world. The technological ability for me to access the songs of a 1970s punk band on my smartphone at a tap, or to hear the stories of other punks from all over the world, has allowed me to build and continue to shape my identity within and without that culture.
Similarly, the fiercely autonomous, educational bent of the international Queer community – so long oppressed, shunned, and forcibly silenced, but ever-striving to educate its members and those outside it as to this oppression, as well as to Queer liberation, art, and activism – all provides the framework in which one can come to terms with themselves as a queer person; something which was doubtlessly much, much harder when we did not have access to a digital society in which we queers could champion and support one another.
To use a personal example, I grew up in a small town, whose culture was (and remains) often close-minded, especially with regards to gender and sexuality. As such, I was implicitly taught that non-Hetero sexualities, as well as non-binary gendered identities were a bad thing (even if my parents were not of that opinion). There simply was no representation in my town, no people I knew as openly queer, and the only things I ever heard said about queerness were intensely negative. It wasn’t until moving to the more cosmopolitan, culturally-diverse city of Glasgow that I began to see the many different walks of life. Later, I would watch RuPaul’s Drag Race, and through that hear the testimonies of many, many queer people. Only thanks to those stories, and the stories of my queer friends, did I find my place within that culture, and determine for the first time in my life, just exactly who I was.
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To conclude, stories are the backbone of culture. They always have been, and they always will be. Because stories don’t just define or remember a culture, they also create a space in which to question, challenge, and help that culture grow. And whether they look like they did when you grew up – fairy tales in books, or oral performances of a family favourite told as you sat on your grandmother’s knee – or they look entirely modern and alien – TikTok videos, memes, YouTube channels, and more – stories are still there, paving the way for the future of culture.
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Thank you for listening to this month’s episode in The Wandering Bard bonus historical and interview series on Stories from the Hearth. Next time, in the third and final installment of The Wandering Bard Season One, we will be examining the role of storytelling in education, and the passing down of moral, ethical, and practical lessons. If you liked what you heard, please do subscribe, and share this podcast with friends, family, and anyone you know who could use just a half-hour’s respite from the chaotic energies of the everyday. You can also now rate podcasts on Spotify, so if you’re listening to it there, why not drop us some stars. If you wish to support the podcast, please head to my Patreon by hitting the link in the description down below, or by heading to patreon.com/storiesfromthehearthpodcast. Similarly, you can check out the podcast’s Instagram, Twitter, website and email address via the links below. Story episodes are released on the last Sunday of every month. Further episodes of The Wandering Bard will pop up from time to time. Until next we meet around the fire, I’ve been Calum Bannerman, and you’ve been listening to Stories From The Hearth.