The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
- G.K. Chesterton
One of the more remarkable things I have noticed since becoming a professional storyteller is the dearth of tellers opting to tell the ‘big’ tales from extant religious traditions. There are, of course, reasons as to why this would be (perhaps obvious reasons), and we will explore these reasons in this article.
This considered, is it not a rather sad state of affairs, when you think about it? Many of the most durable, fascinating, entertaining, and most of all, meaningful, stories are to be found within the holy texts and oral traditions of the world’s major religions.
This isn’t to say that no teller engages in this practice. Indeed, one could argue that most tellers have a story or two in their repertoire that are of a (perhaps quasi-) religious nature. These tend to be, in my experience of hearing and discussing with others in the community, part of a concurrent, informal folk tradition that lives alongside the more formal, mainstream traditions themselves (the differences and similarities will also be discussed below). These folktales are the stories of the religious communities, not central to the religious tradition itself.
Don’t get me wrong, I love these types of stories, with so many of these tales being utterly fantastic. In fact, I share many of them with audiences regularly myself, being proud that they form a part of my repertoire. But they aren’t the Nativity of Jesus. They don’t tend to get to that level of epic.
Or meaningful.
In each section of this article there will be a story or two, ones that correspond to they category described - partly as a representation of the progress from fringe to the core of religious stories, partly because I should share more tales in these articles. Different religious traditions will be represented, but only living traditions: Hellenic, Babylonian, Ancient Egyptian, and other defunct religious traditions will not be included (these traditions are often represented in the work of storytellers worldwide - these tales now being myths).
NOTE: Without trying to denigrate anyone’s personal religious proclivities: whilst I do recognise that there are (so-called) New Religious Movements that borrow heavily from extant religions, and sometimes the ancient, ‘dead’ ones, alongside those that also claim to be re-constituted religious movements based on some these ancient faiths, I think it is prudent to point out that a broken chain in any tradition is very hard to reforge. Perhaps, in time, but for now they remain very young, and thus beyond consideration for this article.
What I hope to achieve here is to instil a sense of comfort for tellers and audiences, both religious and secular, to enjoy these religious stories as we do the many other styles and genres common to the storytelling scene.
Ooft. I’m sure you’d agree that this is a tricky business.
I hope I can convince you that I am neither writing this as a heretic, nor a covert evangelist. I’m simply a storyteller, a vessel through which the tales flow. I’d simply like the best tales to flow through our field to a willing audience, whoever they may be. Many people today simply have not heard the stories found in the Gospels, or the Torah, or the Quran. I hope to aid in remedying this.
Let’s start with a classic, a non-scriptural tale, but a religious one nonetheless.
This folk parable is ancient, weaving its way through the many religions that have suffused themselves into the people of the Indian subcontinent, a fitting tone-setter for this article:
A group of blind people come before an elephant. Someone nearby told them that it was an elephant. One blind man asks, “What is it like? We’ve never been near such a thing!”. They began to touch its body, each person taking hold of a different part. One of them said, “It is like a pillar.”, whilst holding its leg. Another said, “No! The elephant is like a Blanket.” whilst he touched its ears. The person who touched its trunk said “Why, an elephant is like a snake. Stay back!".
“In the same way, he who has seen the Lord in a particular way limits the Lord to that alone and thinks that He is nothing else” - Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa.
Tradition and Rendition
It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
- Henry James
It is hard to overestimate the cultural impact that religion has had on humanity. From visual art and architecture, music and drama, to politics, and even humour:
Hundreds of years ago, the Pope decreed that all Jews in Rome had to convert to Catholicism or leave Italy. There was fear and panic in the Jewish community, so not wanting to seem like a heartless monster, the Pope offered them a deal. He would have a theological debate with whomsoever the Jews elected for this monumental task. The stakes were high: if the Jews won, they could forever stay in Italy and be allowed to prosper as equal citizens. If the Pope won, however, they'd have to convert, leave, or attend a rather short meeting with the executioner. The Jews picked a famously wise rabbi from Krakow to represent them, a man who travelled through Poland, Germany, and his native Bohemia to minister. The date was set, a carriage and a boat commissioned to transport the rabbi from Poland, and the Jews of Rome prayed for his victory. Because the rabbi spoke no Italian nor Greek, and the Pope spoke neither Yiddish nor Hebrew, both sides agreed that they would not speak in their debate. The day came. The Pope welcomed the rabbi to the newly restored Lateran Palace. Two large, ornately carved oak seats were placed in the vast hall. The men sat, and the debate began. The Pope raised his hand and showed three fingers. The rabbi responded with a single raised finger, and shook it at the Pope. The Pope then waved a finger around his head. The rabbi pointed to the ground. The Pope stood up and walked to a nearby table, returning with a communion wafer and a chalice of wine. The rabbi stood up, rummaging in a sack he’d left by the door, and presented an apple. The Pope threw up his arms and exclaimed that the rabbi was the wisest man he’d ever met. The Jews, declared the Pope, could stay in Italy. Later that day, the cardinals met with the Pope, each of them embarrassingly admitting that they had no idea what had happened in the debate. How could the Vicar of Christ, the Supreme Pontiff, His Holiness himself, have lost to a simple Bohemian rabbi? The Pope answered: "Well, first I held up three fingers to represent the Holy Trinity. That clever rabbi responded by holding up a single finger, shaking it to remind me there is still only one God common to both our beliefs. Then, I waved my finger around my head to show him that our Lord is all around us. He responded by pointing to the ground next to himself, showing that if He is all around, then God stood by him as well as by me. I thought I may have bested him when I pulled out the wine and wafer to show that God absolves us of all our sins, but that wise Bohemian Jew pulled out an apple to remind me of original sin, suggesting that I may be biting off more than I could chew, so to speak. Brothers, we may have misunderstood our Jewish neighbours - we have much to learn from men like the rabbi of Krakow!" Meanwhile, the Jewish community of Rome gathered in the Inn the rabbi was lodging at to celebrate the rabbis victory. They all wanted to ask him how he'd won. Finally, after much merriment, somebody asked him to tell the tale. "Don’t ask me!", the rabbi shrugged. "First, the man in the pointy hat told me that you lot had three days to get out of Italy, so I shook my finger to say no, you’d need at least a week to skedaddle. Then he tells me that the whole of Earth would be cleared of Jews, so I told him that we’d all end up buried in the earth, so how was that even possible?." "And what then?" asked a little boy. "Who knows?" said the rabbi. "He took out his lunch, so I took out mine!"
I hate analysing jokes beyond their underlying mechanisms. Indeed, the latent comic within me is currently holding a pointy stick up to my gall bladder for merely considering the prospect of discussing such things.
I can take the pain.
This joke reflects the richness of religious tradition: the often horrific history of interfaith conflicts and persecution, the hope of reconciliation and peace through the power of words, the grandeur of Rome, and the tradition of learning that burns bright amongst the Ashkenazim.
Even in places where there were concerted efforts to eradicate organised religion, such as the Soviet Union, the tradition still formed elements of the culture. Take this typical anekdot (a Russian joke, especially popular during the Soviet era):
A man dies and goes to hell. There he discovers that he has a choice: he can go to capitalist hell or to communist hell. Naturally, he wants to compare the two, so he goes over to capitalist hell. There outside the door is the devil, who looks a bit like Ronald Reagan. "What's it like in there?" asks the visitor. "Well," the devil replies, "in capitalist hell, they flay you alive, then they boil you in oil and then they cut you up into small pieces with sharp knives."
"That's terrible!" he gasps. "I'm going to check out communist hell!" He goes over to communist hell, where he discovers a huge queue of people waiting to get in. He waits in line. Eventually he gets to the front and there at the door to communist hell is a little old man who looks a bit like Karl Marx. "I'm still in the free world, Karl," he says, "and before I come in, I want to know what it's like in there.""In communist hell," says Marx impatiently, "they flay you alive, then they boil you in oil, and then they cut you up into small pieces with sharp knives."
"But… but that's the same as capitalist hell!" protests the visitor, "Why such a long queue?"
"Well," sighs Marx, "Sometimes we're out of oil, sometimes we don't have knives, sometimes no hot water…"- Quoted from an article in Prospect Magazine, 2006
Alongside jokes like the ones above - fun, wry, even contrary - the mark of the religious life is always evident elsewhere. Consider Mozart’s Requiem, Sufi Dervishes spinning their mesmeric dance in Istanbul, the stunning architecture of Harmandir Sahib in Amritsar India: our world is filled with such incredible things built and created in reverence of the transcendent.
These jokes take the form of a story, as many do, with the ‘plot’ elements allowing for expansion if one were so inclined. One could even imagine these morphing into being short folk tales. Indeed, the types of tales we’ll look at next are close to this sort of thing.
Could contemporary storytelling not get in on this just a bit more than we do presently? To move beyond the anekdot, and closer to something akin to the golden gurdwara at Amritsar?
Illusions and Allusions
I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up - they have no holidays.
- Henny Youngman
The ubiquity of religious thought and practice makes it all but impossible to form a large body of workable stories that have no allusions to religion within them. There may be a priest in your serial killer urban legend. The faeries that guard the gate to the netherworld? That gate was found on what is today the grounds of St. Barnabas-in-the-fields, Chiddleswick!
One way to ease into the notion of the religious in secular storytelling is to draw a bit of focus when such things do arise. This entails a bit of familiarisation with history. After all, if we are to imbue a tale with a “sense of place” by knowing basic information and context surrounding locations, why not extend that to any religious connotations?
Let’s consider the example of a Venetian Ghost story (found on the website of a Murano glass company, of all places).
Here’s the gory tale of Fosco Loredan:
Venice, a unique city with a great history and a thousand mysteries, hides in every corner dark stories of crimes, ghosts and demons, fairies and witches, real events and fantasies.
One of these stories have originated in the city center near Rialto where the beautiful little square “Campiello del Remer” is located. The legend tells that in the ‘600, Fosco, a member of the Loredan family, married to Elena, the Doge’s brother’s daughter, became the protagonist of a story of passion and death.
Fosco, who was very jealous of his wife, was convinced that she was betraying him. One evening, having seen her embraced by another man, he ran after her until he reached her near the Campiello del Remer. The woman tried to defend herself by claiming that it was her cousin. Despite the arrival of her uncle the Doge and his guards who tried to defend her from her angry husband, Fosco took the sword and killed Elena by cutting off his head.
Fosco Loredan asked the Doge for forgiveness in the name of a norm in use for the nobles in those times, which justified the betrayed husband if he executed his wife for infidelity. A pardon that the Doge Pietro Grimani however denied.
After being sent in vain to Rome by the Pope to decree his punishment, Fosco escaped from the guards who were taking him to prison, and went to the place where his wife’s head was kept. Arrived in the Campiello del Remer, for the remorse he threw himself into the Grand Canal and let himself drown just a few steps from the shore.
His body was never found, but the legend tells that on full moon nights, when the north wind blows, the ghost of Fosco Loredan reappears, clutching his wife’s head in his hands.
On telling this tale (perhaps at the abandoned hospital on the former plague quarantine island of Poveglia in the Venetian Lagoon…. at night), it may be of some value to offer some context surrounding Papal law. Perhaps to provide some allusions to the suffering of martyred saints? Ambience and mood can be established with more than a sense of place. The fate of our very souls, and those of the tales’ characters, should always be in play in such stories. How can this be done without due acknowledgment to religion?
The Devil, Rakshasa, and a Pocketful of Djinni
I personally feel like an exorcism movie without God is like a western without hats. Sure, you can do it, but why would you try?
Ron Livingston
Staying with the darker side of our narrative art form for a moment, there are overtly religious tales that will delight and cause fright in equal measure.
There is something undoubtedly cool about the darker elements of our world’s religious traditions. Indeed, it tends to be these darker elements that get explored in the more contemporary art forms when drawing upon religion: try to name 3 truly terrifying movies from the past two decades; are all three religiously-tinged stories? At the very least, it’ll often be the case that at least one will be... in fact, I think it’s difficult to consider a really scary horror film that doesn’t have a demon in it.
From the many tales that include the Devil, whether he gets tricked or prevails, that dance around the folk traditions of Europe and the Americas like a jazzy tune you cannot but dance to, to the exploits of plotting, demonic Rakshasa in Hindu tales, and on to the whispered tales of ghul and gullah, the remnants of a pre-Islamic culture that haunts graveyards, waiting for mortals to stumble by - a nice meal for ‘Umm Ghullah (‘Mother Ghoul’), there’s no shortage of spine-tingling tales from our religious traditions.
One story I am particularly fond of comes to us from the Buddhist tradition of Japan. The hungry ghost is a motif found all over the Buddhist world, but the Japanese Jikininki has a different characteristic from it’s doleful, starving cousins - it eats people when it can.
This version, chronicled in Lafcadio Hearn’s 1904 book Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, and found in text here, is the perfect example of a religious tale that, despite not being part of any holy text, exemplifies the faith tradition as much as providing entertainment for the listener:
Long ago, a monk named Musō Soseki was traveling on a pilgrimage when he became lost deep in the mountains. As day began to fade, he came across a dilapidated old hermitage, where an elderly monk gave him directions to a village not far away. Soseki traveled on, and just as night fell he arrived in the village.
The son of the village chief welcomed Soseki and invited him to stay in his house as a guest. “However,” he said, “my father passed away earlier today. In our village, we have a custom. When one of us dies, we all must spend the night away from the village. If we do not do this, we will be cursed. But you are tired from your journey, and seeing as you are a priest, and also not a member of this village, I see no reason why you too must leave. Please feel free to stay in my house this night while the rest of us leave the village.” Soseki gratefully accepted. The villagers all left the village, and Soseki was alone.
That night, the monk recited funerary prayers over the body of the village chief. All of a sudden, he felt a presence nearby. Soseki felt his body freeze up, and he was unable to move. Then, a dark, hazy shape crept through the house and up to the body. The creature devoured the remains of the village chief, and then slipped away as quietly as it had arrived.
The following morning, when the villagers returned, Soseki told them what he had seen during the night. The village chief’s son told him that this was just as the local legends say. Soseki was surprsied, and asked why the monk living in the hermitage did not perform the funeral prayers for the village. The village chief’s son seemed confused. “There is no hermitage nearby. What’s more, there haven’t been any monks in this region for many generations…”
Soseki traced his steps through the mountains to the old hermitage he had seen the night before. The old monk welcomed him into the hovel and told him, “I apologize for showing you such a sight last night. The monster you saw in the village chief’s house was me. Long, long ago I was a priest. I lived in that village, and I performed many funeral services for the dead. However, all I could think of was the payment for my services, and not the souls of the deceased. Because of my lack of conviction, when I died I was reborn as a jikininki. Now, I am forced to feed off the bodies of the dead. Please, save my soul and release me from my torment!”
In that instant, the elderly monk and the dilapidated old hermitage both disappeared. Soseki was sitting on the dirt, surrounded by tall grass. The only feature nearby was an ancient, moss-covered gravestone.
A Pilgrim’s Process
I have not lost faith in G-d. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I've been closer to Him for that reason.
- Elie Wiesel, writer and holocaust survivor
Now to get to the more religious tales.
The trouble with the possibility of telling overtly religious/scriptural stories lies in centuries of abiding by well-defined categories in our civilisations. Namely, priests, and everyone else. Where once the knowledge itself was jealously guarded by every type of priesthood around the world, it is now the case that the treatment of such knowledge is assumed to still be their remit, and theirs alone.
In fairness, very few people hold this view today. But they do exist, all across the faith spectrum. I have been told (not asked) that some tales are “not yours to tell” based on my being outside a particular religious sect:
“How can you possibly understand? It would be a mockery of our faith, and of God to add your words to that which has been written. You aren’t divinely inspired. Your words aren’t either”. I humbly disagree.
Scrap that, I passionately disagree.
If we are to consider, as it is stated by every major religion, that the human race is all a reflection of a creative, divine force, surely it should not be off limits for any child of God to share the distilled wisdom of His design? Surely such an openness to sharing aspects of a specific faith tradition greatly improves the chances that we who are outside said tradition/church/belief system will begin to actually believe, or to return to the fold?
(This is not to say that this is my motive, but I would not preclude anyone for making it so)
Here’s a tale that exemplifies how I see this:
A caravan of Hajis came from Makkah to Madina. Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq lived in the city of Madina. The Hajis decided to go to the Imam to pay their respects. They went to him and saluted him. They were most welcomed. The Imam asked them to tell him about their journey.
One of the travellers praised one of companions very much. He said that his companion was very pious. He was sincere. He did not abuse anybody. He spent all his time praying.
The Imam asked:-
“What is he doing for his living? What work does he do?”
The traveller replied:-
“Sir, he does no work. He only prays.”
Again the Imam asked:
“Who was feeding his camel?”
The traveller replied:
“We used to do that Sir”
The Imam said: “He is not good. He must work. He should not put his burden upon others. All you, those who worked for him, are more pious than him.”
The rest of us, those who believe that the religious tales should be told outside their hallowed golden prisons, will spread these tales further. All should have access to them without proviso, without a purity test. We plan on doing the work.
NB: Cards on the table time: I am, in fact, a man of faith - I am (currently) an Abrahamic Theist (put basically, it’s like being a philosophical Jew, who isn’t traditionally Jewish, or considered a Jew by Jews - we share a metaphysical outlook, not a practice in its entirety). I am not a member of any church, but am absolutely open to a conversion of any kind, from anywhere. God, it seems, has not deigned that necessary for me, thus far.
Sola Scriptura (ut Inspiratio)
The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.
- Harper Lee
Jewish people will often use the phrase “Baruch Hashem” (ברוך השם), which means “Blessed be G-d” as a form of sentence punctuation.
“Why not just write ‘God’ in the last sentence?” you may be thinking. Well, “Hashem” means “the name”, signifying that the true name of God must not be uttered by man, lest you stumble into using it in vain (Exodus 20:7 and Deuteronomy 5:11). So, when translating the phrase to English, it is customary to cut out the ‘o’, signifying the term without writing it. This evasion of the base humanisation of the divine is a feature of many world religions, not only a (now somewhat archaic) aspect of Abrahamic ones. This leads to taboos, clandestine meetings and closed-door synods, secret practices and societies: heck, the druids and scribes of very ancient cultures all over the northern hemisphere kept whole traditions to themselves (supposedly), sharing only the elements they thought relevant with the masses.
Not knowing, in a worldly sense, leads to this treatment of the metaphysical. Consideration of this, and the attempts at clarification and the wisdom accrued, were held by the few. The many got snippets. This is why we have the hangover of exclusivity in treatment of the texts.
So what of those snippets (or, nowadays, the vast majority of the information) that gets filtered to everyone else? The holy books, songs, rituals, are the window to that world. Distilled wisdom, when a drop of the pure, so to speak, would cause most to go blind. Dilution is necessary to help the medicine go down.
The delivery of a sermon, being a contextualised delivery predicated upon the works found in a given holy book, is very close to what we do as storytellers. The motive is different, however - the priest has a religious motive, the storyteller (above all else) has an artistic motive. I don’t believe that this difference alone, as it has for eons, should preclude us from using this body of work.
In that spirit, and with a hope that this can inspire storytellers to delve into the world’s holy scriptures, let us consider an excellent example of an amazing story from the Gospel of Mark (5:1-20, also covered in Matthew 8:28-34 and Luke 8:26-39): the so-called Exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac. Here is my guide document, that is, the written template I use to aid in refreshing my memory of the tale. Performances of the tale vary from the text, retaining the core message of the scriptural versions, but here it is. In my words.
Jesus, the Lamb of God and Lion of Judah, and His disciples, had travelled across the Sea of Galilee to spread their message to the region of the Gerasenes. They disembarked from their boat, finding the hinterland beyond the shore shrouded in thick mists, with foreboding mountains stretching upwards before them. Nobody was there: no fisherman drawing their nets, no merchants selling their wares, no children with their mothers playing in the surf. Near where they had left the boat was a graveyard, silent, save for the cawing of the crows. No mourners, no priests. The place was deserted. Abandoned, perhaps.
Suddenly, from a cave upon the craggy mountain face behind the graveyard, came a mocking, malign laugh. A cry of anguish followed, echoing between the jagged rocks above them, as the travellers looked about. There was a man there, twisted, bowed, and grey, who began to come down to them. As he came through the gates of the graveyard, the old man moved among the tombs like a spider crossing its web towards a silk- embalmed fly. Jesus immediately recognised that this man was afflicted by an unspeakable evil.
He was possessed.
A broken, heavy chain swung lankly from manacles around the man’s wrists. Had he cut them? No, noticed Jesus, they had been wrenched apart. This man could not be held by his fellow countrymen. Whatever resided within him now was strong, strong enough to allow this old man to break heavy iron chains. The disciples recoiled. Jesus stood His ground.
The man looked into the eyes of Jesus, and began to weep. He fell to his knees and howled “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.”
The man’s skin was torn and bruised. In his mountainous home, reasoned Jesus, whatever holds him in its grasp must throw him about like a child playing with a doll. The man’s face was gaunt, and his expression drawn. Something moved behind his eyes.
“Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!”, commanded Jesus. The mists began to dissipate at the sound of His voice, sunshine peeking through the darkened clouds above them.
The man shook, rolling on the ground at the feet of the Son of God. He laid His hand upon the wretched soul before Him, asking: “What is your name?”
“My name is Legion; for we are many”, hissed voices from within the man.
The dancing fire that burned behind the man’s eyes started to diminish. Jesus held him. Tears fell from the man’s face again, but for a moment. He pleaded with Jesus “Send me not from this place, Lord. It was once my home. I hope it could be again”. He followed this, again in a multitude of voices “Yes. Do not send us from this country”.
With the light now coming down on to the forsaken place before Him, Jesus could see clearer the land. He saw, grazing along the hillside near the afflicted man’s cave, a herd of pigs. “Yes”, came the voices from within the man, “Send us into the swine; let us enter them.”
Jesus allowed the demons to flee, casting the filth from within the ailing man, into the herd of swine. The day was clear now, sunshine bathing the abandoned place in glorious light. The herd was truly large, numbering at least 2000.
They went mad, driven down the hillside in a wild frenzy by Legion. One by one, crashing like thunder in the night’s sky, the swine entered the sea.
They all drowned. The swine, that is.
Evil can be vanquished, as Jesus showed us, but killed? Evil doesn’t die, so we had better make it hide, keep it bound, or learn to steel ourselves against it.
The End
Thank you for your consideration. Have a blessed day.