Ever since Monday, I have been creeping into bed at the hour of nine o'clock pm, turning on the radio and listening to Thomas King speak about The Truth About Stories. It's a strange thing, reclining by the radio and doing nothing but listening. I wish I knew how to knit.
The first lecture was dedicated to the notion of the creation story and in it, Thomas King openly speculates about what a culture's creation story betrays about a culture. In the lecture, he compares the judeo-christian story of eden (a punitive creation story) with a native creation story that he told, the story of Charm - The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (a creation story of humour and cooperation).
And in my bed I wondered. What are the creation stories of atheists? Should we be telling the stories that we believe in - creating wonderous stories of superstrings and the big bang(s) to our children? Or should we choose the creation story that is the best as a story but is not the one that we believe in.
A related question: it is essential that one literally believes a creation story?
I don't think so - in fact, to read a creation story as a literal fact will cause you to lose the meaning of the story. It was Joseph Campbell's Power of Myth where I first learned of this idea. He uses the example of the fall of Adam and Eve as an example. If you think of the forbidden "Tree of Knowledge" as a just a tree, you are unable to read the story in a broader sense - that Eden was not a place, but an idea of life without death and that the Tree of Knowledge bequeathed death to Adam and Eve and with it, a sense of impermanance - a sense, it is said that separates us from the animals.
In native creation stories, there was a time in which the animals used to talk to us. They don't any more and this is like a banishment from Eden in a way. That was the larger premise that was popularized by Joseph Campbell (I don't know if he was the "first" to come up with the idea) - that humanity's creation stories and other myths are more alike than not - because all cultures share a common humanity.
Is it the choice of what creation story to tell is, in one small part, what defines a culture?
I think it is - but here is where I get very unsure - can you pick and chose stories to tell from all different cultures? I'm afraid of taking a "shopping" approach to culture - taking only the parts of culture of others' that I want and leaving out the portions that I may need. "I may take the worship but not the sacrifice"
And yet, during his Massey Lectures, Thomas King explicitly gives us the story of Charm. He says this: (I'm paraphrasing here) "The story is now yours. Do with it what you will. Tell it to others. Turn it into a TV special. Or just ignore it. But don't say that you would live your life differently if you had only heard the story of Charm. You've heard it now"
No comments yet.
Close this window