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Following on Mark's "Literacy: peasants and philosophers" (10/10/25) yesterday, also a number of posts on this subject that we have written in the past (see the bibliography), i herewith offer an account of myth and literacy:

Memories within myth
The stories of oral societies, passed from generation to generation, are more than they seem. They are scientific records
By Patrick Nunn, Aeon (4/6/23)

This is a long, richly documented article, from which I will take only a few representative selections.  It begins:

In the 1880s, the American journalist William Gladstone Steel made several visits to a freshwater lake that filled the caldera of an extinct volcano in Oregon. For Steel, these visits were the fulfilment of a dream that began while he was just a schoolboy in Kansas. It was one day in 1870, while reading the newspaper wrapped around his school lunch, that he noticed an article about the ‘discovery’ of a spectacular body of freshwater named Crater Lake. ‘In all of my life,’ Steel would later recall, ‘I never read an article that took the intense hold on me that that one did…’ When he finally made it to the lake in 1885, he was so captivated that he determined to have the area designated as a National Park. But designation was not easily gained and required extensive documentation of the region.

To help with the reconnaissance, Steel engaged guides from the local Klamath peoples, who had occupied the area for countless generations. During their work together, Steel noted that they never once looked at the lake itself, instead ‘making all sorts of mysterious signs and staring directly at the ground’ – a sign that the Klamath regarded Crater Lake as a powerful place where a great cataclysm once happened and might happen again. For, as Klamath stories tell, buried deep beneath the lake waters is the spirit of Llao, a demon who lived within the volcano that once towered above Crater Lake. In a past age, Llao terrorised the Klamath by showering them with hot rocks and shaking the ground on which they lived. This continued until Llao was confronted by the benevolent spirit Skell who pulled the volcano down on the demon and created Crater Lake above.

What sounded to Steel like myth is more than just a story. It is a memory of an eruption that caused a volcano to collapse and form a giant caldera that, as many do, filled with freshwater. The eruption occurred 7,700 years ago, but the Klamath had preserved its story and even sustained associated protocols, such as not looking directly at the lake. Though they did not read nor write when Steel worked with them in the late 19th century, the Klamath people knew a story about an event that had occurred more than 7 millennia earlier, a story carried across perhaps 300 generations by word of mouth.

Many literate people today believe this kind of thing is impossible or, at best, an anomaly, because they evaluate the abilities of oral (or ‘pre-literate’) societies by the yardsticks of literate ones, where information seems far more readily accessible to anyone who seeks it. And, in doing so, they undervalue the ability of these oral societies to store, organise and communicate equivalent amounts of information. I have called this ‘the tyranny of literacy’: the idea that literacy encourages its exponents to subordinate the understandings of others who appear less ‘fortunate’. But accounts like Steel’s are beginning to help break apart this idea: oral traditions, rather than being subordinate, are capable of transmitting just as much useful information as the technologies of reading and writing.

Nunn goes on go recount the work of the French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep in familiarizing himself with the "Indigenous Australian (Aboriginal) oral stories, concluding that these include ‘fragments of a catechism, a liturgical manual, a history of civilisation, a geography textbook, and to a lesser extent a manual of cosmography’."

One of Nunn's main themes, other than volcanic eruptions, are stories of submergence after the end of the last great ice age when the ocean surface was 120 meters lower than it is now and thick ice sheets covered many continents.  As the ice sheets melted, the sea waters rose and the shores were submerged.  Such submergence stories were not true only of remote, exotic lands, but were also prevalent in locations closer to home, such as the Hebrides.  "…Mary Mackay, the chief informant for the Hebridean stories, was clearly also loquacious, rendering her ‘vivid’ tales in ‘felicitous Gaelic’ according to Alexander Carmichael, the folklorist who collected them during the 1860s."

As Nunn points out,

These ‘myths’ are not fiction. Most of the ancient myths of long-established cultures have an empirical core. They are not inventions but observations, filtered through worldviews from potentially thousands of years ago and clothed with layers of narrative embellishment before they reach us today. Framed within the science of their day, they represent knowledge often from times far earlier than those in the world’s oldest books.

The ‘tyranny of literacy’ makes us sceptical of knowledge being retained in oral societies for such a long time

Nunn has made some fundamental discoveries of his own in the realm of oral traditions:

My earliest encounters with people who could neither read nor write (and nor, in this case, speak English) were in the Pacific Islands where I lived and worked for more than two decades. As a geologist, my research took me to some of the remotest corners of the Pacific region, where my self-belief as a conventional scientist gradually eroded and was replaced with an appreciation of other worldviews equally as valid as that with which I had been inculcated. I also became disabused of the belief – held by most Western-educated literate people – that orality is inferior to literacy. As carefully explained by Walter Ong in his classic book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982), not only has literacy transformed human consciousness, shifting it from sound-focused to sight-focused, but is has also ‘weaken[ed] the mind’. For, as Ong wrote: ‘Those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources.’ Plato’s Socrates noted the same thing, arguing that writing ‘destroys memory’, something that sustained oral societies in every part of the inhabited world for tens of thousands of years.

If there was a pivotal moment in my journey towards an awareness of the depth and breadth of oral knowledges, it was late one afternoon in 2004 when, with some colleagues from the Fiji Museum, I started a conversation with Maikeli Rasese at his home in Denimanu Village, the only settlement on Yadua Island in northern Fiji. We wanted to learn something about the human history of Yadua, of which he was a foremost authority. He described each coastal embayment in turn, relating the stories of the people who occupied it over the past few generations, along with eventful moments in its history, such as a shipwreck, a tidal wave, even the heroic repulsing of invading forces. None of this was written down. All of it was in his head. And all came from his lips in perfect order, fluently, just as though he had been reading from a text in front of him.

I had been privileged to witness the expounding of ‘oral traditions’ at their best

After a few hours, as we neared the end of our narrative circumnavigation of Yadua – not, by any measure, a large island [VHM:  spans 14 km² and has a coastline of 34 km] – I assumed we would shortly conclude our evening. But Rasese was not finished. Having exhausted his historical knowledge of the island, he then proceeded to explain where its people had come from originally, how they had abandoned their previous homes on other islands because of growing aggression from new arrivals, and how others of their clan had dispersed but remained in touch, periodically renewing their ties, sometimes through intermarriage, sometimes through the ritualised exchange of traditional valuables. It was 2 am when, seeing his audience drooping with fatigue, Rasese finally ended his storytelling.

The erosion of oral storytelling as a result of information processing technologies has had a decisive impact on the memory skills of modern man:

Half a century ago, people might remember 10 or 20 telephone numbers, but today how many? Smartphones have almost removed any need to remember phone numbers, birthdays, addresses or even names. These developments can make life easier, no question, but they also encourage us to undervalue what we have lost.

Humans have a deep-rooted affection for narrative that, I suggest, was born long ago in oral societies. In those times, listening to the stories of your elders was mandatory, not optional. If you didn’t listen, you couldn’t learn. And if you didn’t learn, you wouldn’t likely survive. So strong was the communal will to survive, that everyone learned – there was no choice. People in oral societies learned to be attentive listeners and, later in life, habitual storytellers.

…

This essay develops ideas discussed in Patrick Nunn’s books The Edge of Memory: Ancient Knowledge, Oral Tradition and the Post-Glacial World (2018) and Worlds in Shadow: Submerged Lands in Science, Memory and Myth (2021), both published by Bloomsbury.

In recent months, one of our prominent themes on Language Log has been the nature and impact of AI and LLMs.  I believe that we have barely  begun to scratch the surface of these incredibly powerful technologies.  How will they shape the functioning of our own minds?  Many people I know, including family, friends, professional colleagues, and, yes, readers of Language Log, engage in days long colloquies with ChagGPT and Ask AI Anything.

As we have pointed out before on Language Log and elsewhere, the world's first grammarian (Pāṇini [mid-1st millennium BC]) and the world's earliest epic poet (Homer [8th c. BC]) were both illiterate.  Because of the Indian suspicion toward writing, even though the Vedas are among the oldest religious texts on earth (mid-2nd millennium BC), they weren't actually written down until many centuries after they were composed.

Vedas are śruti ("what is heard"), distinguishing them from other religious texts, which are called smr̥ti ("what is remembered"). Hindus consider the Vedas to be apauruṣeya, which means "not of a man, superhuman" and "impersonal, authorless", revelations of sacred sounds and texts heard by ancient sages after intense meditation.

The Vedas have been orally transmitted since the 2nd millennium BCE with the help of elaborate mnemonic techniques. The mantras, the oldest part of the Vedas, are recited in the modern age for their phonology rather than the semantics, and are considered to be "primordial rhythms of creation", preceding the forms to which they refer. By reciting them the cosmos is regenerated, "by enlivening and nourishing the forms of creation at their base."

(Wikipedia)

 

Mantras — sacred syllables — SOUNDS

A mantra (/ˈmæntrə, ˈmʌn-/ MAN-trə, MUN-; Pali: mantra) or mantram (Devanagari: मन्त्रम्) is a sacred utterance, a numinous sound, a syllable, word or phonemes, or group of words (most often in an Indo-Iranian language like Sanskrit or Avestan) believed by practitioners to have religious, magical or spiritual powers. Some mantras have a syntactic structure and a literal meaning, while others do not.

ꣽ, ॐ (Aum, Om) serves as an important mantra in various Indian religions. Specifically, it is an example of a seed syllable mantra (bijamantra). It is believed to be the first sound in Hinduism and as the sonic essence of the absolute divine reality. Longer mantras are phrases with several syllables, names and words. These phrases may have spiritual interpretations such as a name of a deity, a longing for truth, reality, light, immortality, peace, love, knowledge, and action. Examples of longer mantras include the Gayatri Mantra, the Hare Krishna mantra, Om Namah Shivaya, the Mani mantra, the Mantra of Light, the Namokar Mantra, and the Mūl Mantar. Mantras without any actual linguistic meaning are still considered to be musically uplifting and spiritually meaningful.

I've always thought of Om as the ultimate sacred, cosmic sound that contains within it all the sounds of the universe, beginning deep in the back of the throat and progressing forward to the lips — passing through the entire vocal tract — from nothing (no sound) to nothing (no sound).

Very satisfying and soothing to pronounce — softly and slowly.

Without being Luddites, some of my dearest friends reject certain elements of modern technology in order to protect their innate abilities.  Xu Wenkan, with whom we are well acquainted on Language Log (see special bibliography below), refused to learn how to process sinographs in computers, and he was less liable to character amnesia than any Chinese person I know.  I myself do not wish to learn how to "text".  Most astonishing of all, many of my super smart students are writing better by hand this year than their predecessors did in the past few decades.  I behold their papers and essays and am breathless at the elegance of their handwritten compositions.  I know not what to attribute this felicitous development to.

Another of my closest scholarly friends, Tsu-Lin Mei, resisted computers.  Instead, he wrote out his papers on an old mechanical typewriter using Eaton's Corrasable Bond.  Sure, it smudged, but Tsu-Lin was happily and intimately in control of his composition.

"Frater studiorum: Tsu-Lin Mei (1933-2023)" (10/22/23)

A final note in this vein.  One of the best students I have encountered at Penn used to spend half an hour to an hour writing out sutras meticulously and neatly every night before going to bed.  She didn't call it "copying sutras", but rather it was "writing sutras".  I asked her if she was mindful of the meaning of what she was writing, and she said no.  It was the sheer act of writing carefully, exactingly that mattered to her.  It was a kind of calming, esthetically pleasing meditation that I believe lulled her to sleep.

 

A Xu Wenkan reader

• "A letter writer of / for the 20th and 21st century" (1/13/25) — with an extensive bibliography on character amnesia
• "Character Amnesia" (7/22/10)
• "Xu Wenkan (1943-2023)" (1/10/23)
• Xu, Wenkan. "The Discovery of the Xinjiang Mummies and Studies of the Origin of the Tocharians". The Journal of Indo-European Studies, 23.3-4 (Fall/Winter, 1995), 357–369.
• Xu, Wenkan.  "The Tokharians and Buddhism". In Studies in Central and East Asian Religions, 9 (1996), 1–17.
• Xu, Wenkan. "Beyond Deciphering: An Overview of Tocharian Studies over the Past Thirty Years".  In Great Journeys across the Pamir Mountains.  Leiden:  Brill, 2018. Pp. 128–139.
• Wei, Lanhai, Hui Li, and Wenkan Xu. "The separate origins of the Tocharians and the Yuezhi:  Results from recent advances in archaeology and genetics".  In: M. Malzahn, Michaël Peyrot, Hannes Fellner, and Theresa-Susanna Illés, eds. Tocharian Texts in Context: International Conference on Tocharian Manuscripts and Silk Road Culture, June 25-29th, 2013. Bremen: Hempen Verlag, 2015.  Pp. 277-300.
• "The origins and affinities of Tocharian" (8/20/23)

 

Selected readings

• "'In Pāṇini We Trust'"(12/15/22)
• "The stupendous powers of memorization in the Indian tradition" (10/23/20)
• "Antakshari recitation in India" (7/1/23)
• "Drama at the National Spelling Bee" (6/7/25)
• "It is that time of the year again" (6/3/24) — with lengthy bibliography on the Spelling Bee
• "Spelling and intuition" (11/30/23)
• "Spelling bee 2022 — back on track" (6/4/22)
• "Spelling bee 2021 – Indian streak broken!" (7/9/21)
• "What happened to the spelling bee this year?" (10/21/20)
• "Spelling Bee 2019" (5/31/10)
• "The worldly sport of spelling" (6/2/18)
• “Spelling bee champs” (6/1/14)
• “Spelling bees and character amnesia” (8/7/13)
• “Brain imaging and spelling champions” (8/7/15)
• “Spoken Sanskrit” (1/9/16)
• "Once more on the mystery of the national spelling bee" (5/27/16)
• "Spelling bees in the 1940s" (7/10/16)
• "Yet again on the mystery of the national spelling bee" (6/5/17)

 

Mythology

• Paul T. Barber & Elizabeth W. Barber,  When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth (Princeton U. P., 2005)
• Michael Witzel, The origins of the world's mythologies (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

[Thanks to John Rohsenow and Jim Unger]

October 11, 2025 @ 6:13 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Literacy, Phonetics and phonology, Typing, Writing

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