Clivedurdle

Someone tells a story around a crackling fire under a beautiful desert night sky after a good meal of roast lamb and having had some cannabis annointing their head.

They haven't heard of computers or going to the moon or quadratic equations or penicillin, but they are not thick, they ask why and come up with solutions - the gods.

How would we work out now the intention of a writer? Did allegory exist?

For example, Noah is a just so story - it explains why there are rainbows.

neilgodfrey

Asking "why" of the inanimate world and coming up with "gods" as the answer points to their "why" question originating with some "theory of mind" about the world. Imputing minds like our own to others was a pretty nifty survival tool in the course of evolution but it could also be incidentally used for initially nonfunctional purposes. A person explains "things that happen and that are" as coming about in the same way that that person creates and makes things happen -- by another mind. And it is easiest to default to projecting human natures into other things, both real and imagined.

And figurative speech and metaphor are both listed along with myths among Donald Brown's list of human universals so one might fairly conclude that something pretty close to allegory is part of the way the human mind works by nature.

So I'd be attempting to understand the intentions of the storytellers in terms of biological, neurological and psychological sciences -- in terms of the raw matter of what we are and how we work.

Neil Godfrey

http://vridar.wordpress.com