The Core of a Tale

“Caught up tn Tales"

In Geschichten verstnekt (Caught up in Tales) is the title of a slim volume by Wilhelm Schapp. which appeared in 1953 and has made some impact at least in German philosophy.’ His ex­perience as a lawvtr kd St happ to realize that what moves peo­ple, what thev e\p‘ricikc.

The interest in tales has also animated studies of folklore, which have been flourishing at least since the beginning of the nineteenth century. They started from a revived interest in myth—in fact, from the very rediscovery of the concept of myth. ■ In the wake of the fairy talcs collected by the Grimm brothers,⁴ national mythologies were rediscovered or reconstructed in Eu­rope and across the world. By 1913, when a Mythology of All Races was collected,⁵ it was taken for granted that the tradition of a particular civilization, especially of preliterate societies, was mainly encoded in tales. While in a way this anticipated Schapp’s findings, in contrast to his starting point, myths are not personal but generalized, the common possession of a group or tribe that helps to constitute its conscious group identity.

It is obvious that many tales are quite similar to each other, appearing to be variations of general underlying patterns or types. The current index of Marchentypen by Aarne-Thompson enumerates about 1000 types of fairy tales,⁸ but the number can be reduced by further generalization. At the same time, a tale is very easy to remember, at any rate if it is a good tale. Everyone could volunteer to tell a tale heard just once, if it has caught his imaginative attention. Contrast the effort needed to remember and to reproduce correctly just a few nonsense syllables, a 10- digit-number, or some words in a language we don’t know. Yet this is what the simplest tape recorder or floppy disk will cheer­fully do. What people do when they recount a tale evidently is quite different. It is not a sequence of sounds and words we re­member and usually not a fixed text either—though children will sometimes exhibit exact memories. Storytellers expand, abbre­viate, change words, and translate. A tale is not a series of words

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but a sequence of events and actions that make sense. While there are tools and props to help remember a text exactly, as in the Brahmanic tradition of Veda or in Islamic Quran schools, they bring out, by contrast, how natural it is to recall a memorable tale. It has an obsessive impact combined with freedom of ex­pression. A tale is a structure of sense.⁹

The Propp Sequence: The Quest

Much work has been done on the structure of tales in recent decades. One of the most successful, influential, and accessible studies is still Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale™ Propp wrote about Russian fairy tales, but the implications of his work go beyond his corpus.¹¹

According to Propp, a tale is to be seen as a sequence of 31 functions (called “motifemes” by Alan Dundes).

Propp’s thesis is that these functions or motifemes are the con­stant elements in tales; the number of functions is limited, and their sequence is fixed. They need not all turn up in a single narrative—the above selection omitted some of them—but every tale contains some combination of these functions, and parts of the sequence may also be repeated. Further formalization of Propp’s approach, notably by Alan Dundes,¹² introduced higher

levels of abstraction, which weaken the memorable and empiri­cally accessible level.

Some critics of Propp’s thesis question his exclusive reliance on his source, Afanas’ev’s collection of Russian fairy tales, and 59 Afanas’ev’s original reliance on his main informant, a Russian peasant.¹³ Conversely, other critics wonder if the author placed too much emphasis on the classical European tradition.¹⁴ To counter such concerns, it is reassuring that Propp’s analysis, whatever its foundations were, is applicable to a wide range of tales which neither Propp nor Afanas’ev, let alone the Russian peasant, had ever known or thought of.

In Greek mythology, which had not been included in Propp’s study, the legend of Perseus had been treated as a model tale.¹⁵ To get Medusa’s head (9) Perseus sets out on a journey (11) to the edge of the world; he meets the Graiai, from whom he gets advice and magical aids (12, 14); then there is the confrontation with the Gorgon (16), the killing (18), the flight, and the pursuit by the Gorgon’s sisters (21).

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Another model myth is th< story of the Argonauts. Its definite literary form was shaped by the Hellenistic poet Apollonios of Rhodes; but centuries before, for the audience of the Odyssey this was a song “dear to everyone.”^IK Karl Meuli interpreted it on the model of a fairy tale, and it clearly agrees with Propp’s pattern.¹'* Pelias at lolkos desires the golden fleece (8); lason is told to get it (9). The collection of various helpers (12, 14) right at the start, the crew of the ship Argo in this case, is a special feature of this talc type. Further helpers and adversaries show up on the ship’s route until the voyagers reach their destination (15), Aia or Kolchis, where Medea, princess and witch, turns out to be the decisive helper who provides knowledge and magical means against the adversary, her father, King Aietes.

The earliest written tales are Sumerian, and here Propp’s pat­tern triumphs. “Gilgamesh and Huwawa” has long been known as part of the Gilgamesh epic, but the older Sumerian version has been edited in its full form only recently.²² It starts with the desire (8) of Lord Gilgamesh to go to the mountain to “put up his name.” For this journey he collects helpers (14), foremost among whom is his servant Enkidu. There is also a curious group of seven with animal characteristics—lion, eagle, serpent—and superhuman abilities granted by the Sungod; other young men from his city come too. This early written text displays the du­plication of motifs—or rather, gathering of competing variants— which underlines the necessity of this “function.” Gilgamesh has to cross seven mountain ranges before he reaches the cedar tree (15) which he fells; the adversary Huwawa, the guardian of the

mountain, attacks (16) and defeats Gilgamesh with a kind of superweapon, a beam of awe (17); but Gilgamesh recovers thanks to Enkidu. He then begins to trick Huwawa, offering him his sisters as concubines; finally Huwawa surrenders his wonder weapon, he is struck by force, and Enkidu cuts off his head (18). The head is brought to the god, Enki (20), who establishes a new distribution of powers. In this way the tale ends on a religious, aetiological note, but the narrative functions have shown up in the recognized sequence.

Another early and important Sumerian text is “Ninurta and the Asakku.”²³ A kind of damage (8) has occurred because the demon Asakku, son of Heaven and Earth, installed himself on the mountain, had sex with the mountain, and engendered the rock demons who have rebelled against the gods. So valiant Nin­urta goes out to fight them (9,11). His helper is Sharur, his club, endowed with speech and intelligence (12,14); the confrontation with Asakku (16) is difficult, but in the end Ninurta is victorious (18), annihilates the adversary, and organizes the country for cultivation. Ninurta has the role of a cultural hero, overcoming the demon of the mountain as Gilgamesh vanquished the demon of the woods.²⁴ The quest tale is about to turn into sheer combat tale, but it retains its character with the road to the unexplored region and the practical result of the action, whereby stones from the mountain’s quarries become available for human use and timber for the temple in the city.

Even closer to the Propp pattern is the famous text of the “De­scent of Inanna to the Netherworld.”²⁵ In this tale, the first move of a quest seems to fail: Inanna, the goddess of fertility, gets lost in the Land of No Return (8). This would be a catastrophe to the world, but it releases a new sequence. Because of the loss, Enki creates heroic shaman-like figures (9) called kurgaru and kalaturru.¹⁶ They set out for the netherworld (11), using magic to pass the door unnoticed like flies (15). When they meet the adversary, Ereshkigal, queen of the netherworld (16), instead of resorting to violence, they use their wits. They endear themselves to Ereshkigal and ask her for a gift: the disfigured corpse of In-

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anna, which they sprinkle with the water of life (19). On the return journey they are pursued (21) by a host of demons who exact a substitution sacrifice.²⁷ Here myth meets with ritual in the demand for offerings, but the situation of pursuit and magical flight is still part of the Propp sequence.

The climax of the Gilgamesh epic is the greatest quest, the quest for life. It is a grievous loss (8), the death of Enkidu, that makes Gilgamesh abandon his home (11) and wander through the steppe. How his idea to search for life comes about is lost in a lacuna of the text. On his adventurous and fantastic way the hero follows the way of the sun through the twin mountain, beyond which he meets his helper (12), Siduri the alewife. She tells him how to cross the water of death with Urshanabi the ferryman so as to reach Utnapishtim, the hero of the flood, who alone has escaped death (15). Utnapishtim proves a friendly though talkative host, and after some tests that yield unpromis­ing results, he gives Gilgamesh the crucial information about how to appropriate the “plant of life” (19). Gilgamesh sets out to return home, accompanied by Urshanabi who henceforth quits his service. But at a fountain, when Gilgamesh falls asleep, a snake comes and swallows the plant of life (24). The quest has failed. Thereafter, snakes can cast off their old age by sloughing, whereas man remains bound to death. Pessimistic wisdom over­comes the inherent optimism of the tale.²⁸

“The tale (mythos) is the soul of the drama,” Aristotle wrote,²⁹ “soul” being an organizing principle of nature. The Propp pat­tern acts as an organizing principle from the earliest tales that have been recorded, through classical mythology and far beyond. It would be easy indeed (and tedious) to trace the Propp orga­nizations through romances, drama, and modern movies, science fiction, and even computer games. A general and transcultural form of organizing experience seems to be at work. It follows that when we understand a tale, we can easily memorize it, re­produce it, even reconstruct it from incomplete records. Whether by instinct or by routine, we seem to know what should happen next. We like a tale to be retold. Repetitive and fascinating as it is at the same time, it may be called the adventure par excellence, or just the quest.

From Biological Programs to Semantic Chains

One obvious hypothesis would be that the tale-telling program owes its existence to previous learning. As people, especially chil­dren, are told stories, a lot of stories of all sorts, they build up a storage system in the form of sequences and functions and thus gradually become better and faster in their understanding. This, however, should lead to the emergence of quite different forms of organizing experience, and hence different patterns of tales out of different civilizations. Yet the sequence of the quest is surprisingly persistent and nearly ubiquitous through more than four millennia. Is it legitimate to look beyond civilization for its basis or origin?

In 1979 I wrote confidently: “If we ask where such a structure of sense, such a program of actions, is derived from, the answer must evidently be: from the reality of life, nay, from biology. Every rat in search of food will incessantly run through all these ‘functions’.”³⁰ Studies of rat behavior show the compelling com­bination of energy and swift intelligence in this most successful animal species, as rats manage to solve their everyday problem, the provision of food. Even for our nearest relatives, rhe apes, the quest for food has remained the day's main occupation; nor can humans do without it. It is clear that the biological program necessary to fulfill the special needs of a highly organized being will contain a series of basic functions: pursuit of a need (8); leaving home (11); finding the place required (15); meeting com­petitive, often dangerous adversaries (16); success (18), meaning realization of desire (19); but return to the home base (20) may be difficult in case of pursuit (21); the outcome is the individuals salvation (22). As it turns out, practically the whole of the Propp sequence is prefigured in this series of biological necessities. The main strand of Propp’s sequence can be summarized in one word: the quest, which may entail many dangers, including combat.

The biological equivalent of the quest is the search for food, which includes the struggle against others who are in quest for the same resources, and the possibility of tricks, fight, and flight. 64 As I wrote in another context:

Actions are represented by the verb, and the verbal root, the “zero form” of the verb, in most languages—including English, German, French, Latin, Greek, Semitic, and Turkish—is the im­perative; and communication by imperatives is more primitive, and more basic, than communication by statements. The deep­est deep structure of a tale would, then, be a series of impera­tives: “get,” that is, “go out, ask, find out, fight for it, take and run.”³¹

Surprising confirmation of this point has emerged from a field which many will judge intermediate between biological functions and human actions: chimpanzee language. Among the apes that have been taught sign language, the most successful was a fe­male, Washoe. The extent to which this is “real” language is hotly debated, but this is not the decisive issue here. It suffices that humans and chimpanzees can communicate through this me­dium, even if the apes’ interest is limited; it continues to concen­trate on food. Roger S. Fouts records the following conversation with Washoe.³² “George: What you want? Washoe: Orange, or­ange. George: No more orange, what you want? Washoe: Or­ange. George (getting angry): No more orange, what you want? Washoe: You go car gimme orange. Hurry.”

This is obviously a sequence for getting food. The chimpanzee is intelligent enough not only to realize and express the desire but to organize the necessary sequence of actions. She had not been riding in a car recently, we are told, but she knows that one gets oranges by driving to the supermarket. The Propp sequence is present in an incipient stage, and it makes sense. There is a need (8); the hero is told to go (9) and to use the appropriate magical means (14); then need will be fulfilled (19). Washoe has her goal and she makes her plan, articulating it in a chain of

commands/events. It is safe to say that the chimpanzee is able to correlate the series of necessary actions in her brain: she organ izes her thoughts by mentally preparing motion before starting real action; and having been taught sign language, she can ex press this program in language, in a sequence of imperatives.

This is strikingly similar to protolanguage as observed in the case of an abandoned and hence retarded child. The most distinct utterance recorded from this child was “applesauce buy store.”⁴’' Again, what is expressed is not just desire, but knowledge about the means to fulfill it, and that expression is put in a speech sequence, with a verb at the center to be understood as impera­tive.

I do not claim that Washoe has told a tale; but we may be in a position to localize here, as it were, the missing link that makes the transition from biology to language, from program of action to verbalized account.³⁴ An important program, such as the quest for food, can be prefigured mentally as a sequence of actions and is most easily verbalized as a sequence of imperatives. The se­quence involves analysis of the general urge into goals and means and their pragmatic interaction. The organizing principle of a tale, the soul of the plot, is found to operate at the level of bi­ology. The tale is created as a necessary sequence of “motifemes,” and it has the pragmatic function of solving a problem. In other words, the quest is established as the means for problem-solving, and it is represented and communicated through the tale.

This is not to claim explanation of the origin and function of language as such, or even explanation of the whole of the Propp sequence. It is not my purpose to ascribe animal biology to man, but to recognize what is specific in human civilization when it is viewed against its nearest background; to place man-created monuments within the biological landscape which still prescribes their original design.

Looking back, or rather looking ahead toward the developed Propp sequence, one strange but characteristic detail is the inci­dent of meeting the giver or helper (1.2 to 14) who provides the magical means to make the quest a success.¹³ This flight of fan-

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easy in fairy rales also appears in myths, with the Graiai on Per­seus' way to Medusa, or with Hermes presenting the plant moly to Odysseus to help him overcome Circe?⁶ It seems to be a far cry from fantasy to biology. Still, what makes the difference be­tween failure and success in each quest is that at some decisive moment the various attempts and possibilities get organized into one definite, feasible plan, to be executed without delay. We may call this the moment of inspiration, the aha-Erlebnis. “A god put it into his mind,” the Homeric formula would say; it is the mo­ment when Athena meets disoriented Odysseus and makes him recognize Ithaca.³⁷ When chimpanzees solve problems by think­ing, they clearly have their aha-Erlebnis too. Tales are a human prerogative, no doubt, but the moment of inspired decision is keeping to the tracks of biological reality, no less than a hair­raising shudder.

Another strange characteristic of the quest tale is the asym­metry of going and returning. The way back often is different from the way taken before the decisive encounter. The normal geometry of space seems to disintegrate. In defiance of geogra­phy, the Argonauts have to take a totally different route to return to lolkos; nor can Odysseus retrace his steps. In fact this asym­metry also reflects the experience of biological reality, for prob­lems and perspectives rapidly change with the moment of suc­cess. The rat that got the cookie has to run fastest to escape the others and to reach a safe place. This is the end of a successful quest.

The transition from pragmatic imperatives to nonpragmatic tales is not hard to imagine. It is obvious that women and men like to use language in ways that are not directly linked to in­formation. Humans are talkative; we can hardly stand to be to­gether without saying a word.³⁸ We can visualize our ancestors sitting around the fire in the evening, rehearsing the sequences of imperatives that occurred in the important activities of the day. In talking about them the imperatives change their meaning, and a tale is born. It has the sequence of motifemes as encoded in the program. This is why it is understood by all and makes

sense. During the evolution of mankind, for hundreds of thousands of years t he most important form of the quest has been hunting.¹⁹ The first examples of tales within the quest pattern may well have been hunting tales, with combat tales following closely. In time tales assumed their basic functions, to rehearse some important “out of gear” moves in the mental world and thus to uphold the common world of a cultural society.

Curiously enough, the Indoeuropean language had one special category of verb inflection, a most simple category called “in­junctive” that was used both for the imperative and for the tale.⁴⁰ It is fully preserved in the Vedic language; relics exist in Greek. In his book entitled Der Injunktiv, Heinz Hoffmann describes that second function as “beschreibende Erwähnung,” which means mentioning what is basically known, in contrast to con­veying information. Of course even Indoeuropean, spoken per­haps in the fourth millennium B.c., is already far from the earliest human language. It nevertheless illustrates the possibilities of transition from imperative to tale in the context of the quest.

The Shaman's Tale

One theory makes of the special ritual of shamanism the guiding principle, if not the origin, of storytelling. The shaman, in a state of ecstatic performance, acts out a quest of supernatural dimen­sions; he can ascend to heaven or go down to the netherworld; he meets with spirits, demons, and gods. His purpose is to re­trieve the souls of sick people that are held prisoner in the be­yond, or to release for the hunt animals held back by an offended master or mistress of animals. The classic reports of shamanism come from Siberia and from the Eskimos. By using mimicry, sym­bols, and normal speech the shaman makes the sequence of his adventures clear to those present at the seance—who, by the way, know about the normal program of the exploit anyway. The sequence can easily be reproduced by telling or rather; retelling the story. Thus shaman poetry is presumed to play a role, perhaps

even a basic role, in the development of proliferate narrative, and hence in the growth of literature."

C^nitc a few instances of the quest tale seem to recall a sha- 68 manistic pattern. The quest of the Argonauts to get the golden fleece from the land of the Sun, or to “bring back the soul of Phrixos,” with a hero named lason or leson, whose name can be understood as “healer,” are all shamanistic elements.⁴² In the Su­merian story, Inanna’s retrieval from the netherworld is clearly a shamanistic exploit.⁴¹ Asinnu, the hero’s designation in the Ak­kadian version, refers to a peculiar class of people in real life. These arc social outsiders of uncertain sexual identity who play special instruments and are needed for certain rituals. They seem to be debased shamans. Similarly, Gilgamesh travels the way of the sun to the beyond, as does Heracles on his way to Geryoneus; Odysseus reaches Circe, daughter of the Sun God, at the dancing place of Dawn; Odysseus also goes down directly to the neth­erworld. All these are shamanistic feats, all these heroes could be described as shamans. One characteristic of shamans’ tales is that they are told in the first person. The performance enacts the immediate experience of “I go, I see,” which is reenacted in the story of “I went, and I saw.” With Odysseus, the device has be­come literary artifice, but its shamanistic background looms large.

Shamanism ritualizes the fantastic, giving shape to realms of the unknown. The shaman concentrates on the realistic action program of the quest, how to get what is needed. The action includes leaving home, assembling helpers, arriving at the essen­tial spot, making deals with an adversary—usually a god or mas­ter—which may involve supplication, laborious service, trick, or force. Then it is necessary to find the way back through danger­ous realms, and to evade pursuing demons.

Shamanism and tale-telling appear to have the same intimate relationship as that between tales and imperatives. It is not sur­prising that a tale is turned into a play, following the impulse of the program and acting out the events in sequence. In this per­spective the myth-and-ritual complex must have quite distant roots.⁴⁴ One form of consistent elaboration is rhe shamanistic seance; another, in a different cultural environment, is rhe the­ater—which remained under the guidance of myth in ancient Greece,

Shamanistic experience surely is specifically human, implying, as trance does, the supremacy of the world of meaning as against actual pragmatic interaction. Yet the imagination necessarily elaborates on natural programs as these developed in biological evolution. In other words, shamanism is a special development of the general program of the quest, with characteristic refine­ment or surplus that has its repercussions on preliterate narra­tive.

In many respects this is close to dreams, another field parallel to narrative fantasy. Some thinkers, notably Carl Gustav Jung and his school, perceive dreams and mythology as being in close contact. It should not be overlooked, however, that dreaming predates the advent of man. All higher animals seem to have dreams, though of course they lack verbalization. Dreams appear to reproduce action and visualization patterns, and this brings them close to plays and tales. Dreams may add to the repertoire and mood of human narrative, as shamanism does, without hav­ing to be the origin of mythology.

The Initiation Tale: The Maiden's Tragedy

The quest narrative is outstanding but not unique. There are other types of tales, such as wanderings, genealogies, miraculous birth and death, revenge, and deception.⁴⁵ One favorite fairy tale, documented in about 1,500 variants worldwide, is Amor and Psyche or “the animal bridegroom.”⁴⁶ The text, as it appears in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, has often been called the one surviving fairy tale of antiquity, although the characters involved bring it close to allegory: Soul, Psyche, meeting Love, Amor (cor­responding to the Greek psyche we would expect eras) and giving birth to Pleasure, Voluptas. Psyche, the beautiful daughter of a king, is expelled from her father’s house by command of an or-

acle and abandoned on a cliff near a precipice. Winds carry her down to a wonderful valley with a mysterious house, where she is tended by invisible servants; at night, a male visitor whom she 70 is forbidden to see—Amor himself—makes her his wife. Happy

life continues until Psyche, upon the instigation of her sisters, is overcome by curiosity to see her husband; by the light of her lamp she beholds Amor but scalds him with a drop of oil; he disappears. While searching for her lost husband, Psyche is caught by Venus, her mother-in-law, who maltreats the younger woman severely and puts her to various tests; finally Psyche is accepted among the gods and officially married to Amor, to whom she bears Voluptas.

In a brilliant and polemical study of 1977, Detlev Fehling pro­posed that all the known variants of this story are dependent upon the literary text of Apuleius, making an argument against romantic ideas about folk tradition that persists through the ages, untinged by literature. The romantic view has come under attack from other scholars, too.⁴⁷ It must be accepted that the literary tradition and the folk tradition have interacted, and folk tradition became containable only through writing. Neverthe­less, Fehling’s thesis leaves us with the problem of where Apu­leius got his tale from; that he simply invented his story is hardly an answer. It is quite difficult to invent a tale; even a new creation will inevitably merge with the stream of tales heard before, and thus become a variant of what has already been around.

Parallels older than Apuleius are not lacking; if not fairy tales, then relevant myths. Closest to Amor and Psyche are some Or­phic versions of the myth of Kore-Persephone.⁴⁸ Here is, to begin with, the enchanted house to which Kore the Maiden has been confined by her mother, Demeter, for protection. It stands at the fringe of the earth close to Okeanos; it has special servants, in­cluding the Sirens to make music, just as Psyche’s house is filled with music. While Kore is working at the loom, Zeus, in the form of a snake, penetrates the house and impregnates his own daugh­ter. After this Kore, enticed by her sisters Athena, Artemis, and Aphrodite, leaves the house to collect flowers in the meadow,

whence she is abducted by Hades to become queen of the neth­erworld. There she gives birth to chthonic Dionysus, son of Zeus. The Orphic poems survive only in fragments which are difficult to date but are most likely earlier than Apuleius (the extant po­etic elaborations by Claudian and Nonnos were done much later).

The stories within this category exhibit the same basic struc­ture and clearly parallel motifs. Kore means “maiden”; the pat­tern has been called the Maiden’s Tragedy.⁴⁹ It has been said to provide a “model for the surface level of the narrative structure of the female fairy tale.”⁵⁰ The pattern clearly is different from the Proppian sequence, the heroic quest. It is tempting to call it typically feminine, in contrast to the male adventure sequence, though there is nothing in nature to forbid female quests; indeed, a quest is included in the second part of Psyche’s adventures.

The Maiden’s Tragedy can be analyzed by the methodology used by Propp, to make up a sequence of functions or motifemes. There are at least five of these in immutable order: (1) A sudden break in a young girl’s life, when some outside force makes her leave home, separating her from childhood, parents, and family life; (2) a period of seclusion, often elaborated as an idyllic though abnormal stage of life, in a house or temple, or instead of being enclosed in a house, she may be roaming through the wilderness out of reach of normal human settlements; (3) the catastrophe that upsets the idyll, normally caused by the intru­sion of a male, in most cases a special male, a demon, hero, or god who violates the girl and leaves her pregnant; this results (4) in a period of tribulation, suffering, and punishments, wander­ings or imprisonment, until (5) she is rescued and there is a happy ending after all. The ending is directly or indirectly related to the birth of children, most often a son; in Greek mythology the child is usually an important tribal hero or eponym. In fact the tale often serves as an introduction to the heroic quest of the son; in this sense the pattern has been called “the birth of the hero.”⁵¹

Some examples from Greek mythology are Danae, mother of Perseus;⁵² Auge, mother of Telephos;⁵³ Io, mother of Epaphos,

the forefather of the Danaoi;⁵⁴ Kallisto, mother of Arkas, the eponym of the Arcadians;⁵⁵ Melanippe, mother of Boiotos and Aiolos; Antiope, mother of the Boeotian Dioscures, Amphion 72 and Zethos.⁵⁶ All these stories have the same basic plot, structure, and happenings.

Although the pattern seems to be especially prominent in Greek mythology, it is not confined to it. It exists, for instance, in Maya civilization.⁵' The earliest example is implicit in the leg­end of King Sargon, the first Great King of Mesopotamia: “Preg­nant with me became my mother, a High Priestess; in secret she gave birth to me. She put me in a basket of rushes....”⁵⁸ No more about rhe woman, nothing about the father. But the priest­ess giving birth in secret implies the period of seclusion and the breaking of the taboo, followed by the auspicious new beginning. The tragedy of the young woman who has to expose her son was repeated often.⁵* The stories of Moses and of Romulus and Re­mus, born to the Vestal Virgin Rhea Silvia, are particularly close to the Sargon legend.“’ Did the legend spread from historical Sargon through more than 2000 years to characterize the new king?

The pattern reappears in well-known fairy tales. In “Rapunzel,” for example, the girl is secluded in a tower, but the prince intrudes nonetheless. Discovery of the secret union results in separation and tribulation, but there must be a happy ending. The French author of this tale claimed she had freely invented it?¹ In reality, she must have drawn, consciously or subconsciously, upon the many tales of virgins secluded in a tower, and simply rearranged well-known motifemes. The pattern is even clearer in “Snow White,” from the Grimm collection?² The heroine, expelled from home on account of her beauty and destined to die by command of her stepmother, arrives at the house of the dwarfs, where she leads an idyllic yet—according to German morality—virtuous and industrious life among these hard-working miners. The idyll ends when she is made to swallow a poisoned apple, which leaves her in a death-like sleep, lying in a coffin of glass. Finally, of course, the prince arrives to awaken her with his kiss, A more

realistic and ribald version is told in a popular German song, attested since the sixteenth century.⁶⁵ This tells of a horseman who had an affair with a maiden and disappeared; when the girl became pregnant, her mother made her lie down on a bier as if dead; the preparations for the funeral brought the rider back to do decent mourning, but behold, the girl rose from the dead and marriage became unavoidable.

It is obvious that the sequence of the maiden tale closely fol­lows the natural, biological life cycle of women in transition from childhood to adulthood. By nature, there are three dramatic events that work this change: menarche, intercourse, and preg­nancy. The parallels in the tale pattern are seclusion, sexual en­counter, and childbirth. This is no coincidence; the biological foundation of culture, however much it is verbalized in the tra­dition of the tale, could hardly be more obvious.

The connection is, of course, most evident at the sexual en­counter that separates the two stages of transition: the bed of Amor and Psyche, or Zeus and Danae, Heracles and Auge. Greek mythology is explicit as to sex, while fairy tales as edited in the nineteenth century are opaque on that subject. “Rapunzel” is comparatively frank, but Snow White’s swallowing the apple is more circumstantial. That pregnancy should appear as a period of tribulation is nothing but realistic. It is equally clear that the final salvation has to do with the birth of a child. There may be some overlapping of time at the level of the tale: in the Theban myth of Antiope, for example, the vexed mother is finally rescued by her grown-up sons. It is true that menarche is never explicitly mentioned in myth or fairy tale. Menstruation is unspeakable, arrheton, and women themselves avoid mentioning it, leaving males with only vague knowledge about it. But the fact that Auge is washing clothes when she is attacked by Heracles may be a relevant pointer.⁶⁴ Instead of talking about pubescence, the tales dwell on the provocative beauty of the maiden as cause of her expulsion, without explaining the necessity of it. Yet the biolog­ical reason underlying this motif is obvious. Sexual maturity breaks up the family structure, or its analogues in higher animals,

the mother-child relation. The ties that bind the individual to the older generation must be dissolved for the sake of autonomy.⁶⁵ The tales bring in motifs of female jealousy or of patriarchal 74 anguish, as the elders try to resist their own replacement, but the oracle’s necessity must prevail.

These findings merely mark the beginning of the really intri­cate problems. How are we to account for the interaction of nature and culture in this type of tale? How does the biological program of individual development, a very old and natural pro­gram indeed, penetrate language and get transformed into the narrative chain of these traditional tales? The biological program functions without words and without much conscious reflection.

It is here that ritual comes in. Worldwide, rituals are per­formed to mark and to act out the natural stages of female de­velopment. Although they take different cultural forms,⁶⁶ they generally bear close resemblance to the tale pattern which has been in focus here. Female puberty initiation has become a model case of the close connection of myth and ritual, ever since Jane Harrison’s book of 1890, Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens.⁶⁷ The story in Apuleius is, after all, about the meeting of soul and sexual love; kore just means “maiden.” The Isis mys­teries and the great painting in the Villa of Mysteries at Pompeii have also been drawn into the context of initiation toward mar­riage.⁶⁸ The pattern of tales as well as rituals conforms to the famous structure of rites of passage as elaborated by van Gen­nep:⁶⁹ separation, liminal period on the periphery, and reintegra­tion; at the same time, the tale pattern closely follows nature. Female initiation rituals may start from the first menstruation— which often means separation or seclusion—and go on to the birth of the first son, which marks the definite status acquired.⁷⁰ Initiation rituals follow biology, and the narrative structure of the female fairy tale keeps to the same tracks.

Yet some hiatus remains. Initiation rituals are anything but natural. It is a mistake to make the assumption that nature trans­forms itself into ritual, and ritual in turn is followed by language. Rituals are complicated, ambivalent, and not seldom opaque

even to those who practice them. We cannot project into some vague prehistoric period the ideal of a natural yet well-ordered life, with wise Zarastros leading every Tamino and Pamina to­ward the desired end. Elaborate initiation rituals are not natural, 75 ubiquitous, or continuous. Far from being simple transpositions from nature into culture, they rather contradict nature in certain cases.⁷¹ It makes more sense to see them as cultural attempts to make the “facts of life” manageable and predictable; to perform an act of artificial social creation, as if to veil biology. In per­forming such rituals people act as if the adolescent, male or fe­male, could not simply grow adult on his or her own, but must be made a man or woman by society. Ritual activity follows the clues of nature, but works on them with the force of conscious tradition elaborated through unnatural, cultural choice; with ex­aggeration, repetitiveness, and other complications. Because the force of cultural tradition is so strong, the pattern here is less universal than the uniformity that had been found regarding the quest.

Ancient Athens had two main religious institutions connected with girls’ initiations: the service of arrhephoroi for Athena at the Akropolis,⁷² and the cult of Artemis at Brauron by girls called “bears,” arkteia⁷³ At first glance these seem to correspond to the two possibilities of seclusion during initiation, in the house within the sanctuary, and at the periphery, at the seashore. In the case of the arrhephoroi, while we do find a very close parallelism of myth and ritual, the connection with initiation is questionable. With the arkteia we come as close as possible to female puberty initiation, but we have difficulties finding the expected myth; in­stead of it we are confronted with different mythical patterns that seek explanation in terms of divine wrath and expiatory sacrifice.⁷⁴ Even the myth of Iphigeneia is connected to Brau­ron.⁷⁵

About myths, it is striking that the same myth can refer either to initiation or to sacrifice, to natural maturing as well as to the most unnatural violence.⁷⁶ In the Bible Jephtha, the Judge of Is­rael, is forced to sacrifice his daughter because of a vow made

before his victory in war." I he daughter willingly complies, but asks as a favor to be allowed to wander about in the mountains with her girlfriends before her death, weeping for her never-to- 76 be-lost virginity; and this, says the Bible, has become a custom in Israel. Every year, for four days, girls go to the mountains to dance and to sing of the daughter of Jephtha, who never knew a man. The custom clearly has initiatory motifs and functions. The girls leave their families and spend some time en marge in a strange and possibly idyllic environment, playing the tambou­rines, dancing, and mourning. The ritual is reflected in a tale about death by sacrifice. Thus the mythical heroine is presented in stark contrast to what normal girls will experience. For an­other reversal, we may point to the girls’ ritual lament at Troizen as described by Euripides in his Hippolytos. They mourn and shear a lock of hair for Hippolytos, the beautiful youth who died by the wrath of Aphrodite without ever knowing a woman.⁷⁸ Death, sexuality, and birth are close to each other in the world of nature; sacrificial ritual and myth make of death a barrier, as if to block that transition.

Gloomy associations with death and sacrifice abound in other variants of the maiden’s tragedy. What happens to Kore­Persephone is, by common understanding, death. A strange yet characteristic ambivalence surrounds the optimistic, natural se­quence leading to marriage and birth, and an unnatural variant that leads to sacrifice. Iphigeneia, of “powerful birth” in her name but sacrificed as a virgin to the virgin goddess, appears as the epitome of this ambivalence. And the death of the virgin is not merely symbolic. The gloomy garments offered to Artemis at Brauron are relics of young women who had in fact died. At Rome, the vestal virgins are selected by the pontifex maximus to live a secluded life for thirty years, tending the perpetual fire at the hearth of the Vesta temple; if the fire gets extinguished by accident, they are flogged; if any of them is found to have inter­course with a male, she is buried alive.⁷⁹ This is uncannily close to the sequence of seclusion, sexual crisis, and punishment. It is

not impossible to derive even this peculiar Roman institution from original initiation rituals.⁸⁰

Even in the less somber initiation myths we should be alert to unnatural social factors and motifs. The tribulations typically following the sexual encounter usually come from real families, a vindictive father, a stepmother, a mother-in-law; these are ten­sions characteristic of the family in many civilizations. The search for the lost husband, on the other hand, in nineteenth­century versions of Amor and Psyche or the “animal bride­groom,'’ appears to be more of a bourgeois concern.

The prominence of the pattern in Greek mythology, in tales mainly reshaped and retold by men, may give rise to further sus­picions. The prominence of the sexual encounter may be espe­cially gratifying to males, and the virgin’s seclusion all the more inviting for those who dare to break the taboo, with Zeus leading the ranks. Seclusion has consigned the virgin to passivity; as a consequence, the sexual act approaches rape.⁸¹ Another, hidden aspect might be the masking of a closely parallel homosexual pattern for boys. We get the abduction, the homosexual idyll, and the return to normal male society for struggle and combat, until the married status may be attained by the fully adult. A foremost example is the story of Pelops as told by Pindar—Pelops is abducted by Poseidon and brought back later to win the horse race for Hippodameia.⁸² We know how closely this corresponds to ritualized homosexuality in Crete.⁸³ Kaineus, raped as a girl by Poseidon and then transformed into an unbeatable warrior, is an earlier attested myth on similar lines.⁸⁴ This gives a special, cultural tinge to the more basic pattern. If stories of the maiden type were regularly told by Greek males, they may well have reflected their own development, recast through proximity and distance into things that happen to females.

Although the parallelism of tale structure and biological on­togenesis is undeniable, and ritual interacts with both, the form of transition envisaged for the quest type is not applicable in this case. The program for “getting” could be expressed in impera­tives which enter the level of communication at a primitive stage

(remember the chimpanzee). The tale was seen to develop in pro­tolanguage from an established basis. The ensuing pattern, apart from its shamanistic adaptation, was apt to develop into the typ- 78 ical male initiation myth whereby the hero has to perform the quest before taking up full social responsibility. The initiatory elements in the stories of Perseus, of the Argonauts, of Heracles, and of Odysseus need hardly be stressed. The Perseus myth was in fact connected with an Argive initiation ritual.⁸⁵ Vladimir Propp himself at a later point tried to trace back his morphology of tales to the initiation pattern.⁸⁶

The maiden’s tragedy seems to be the female counterpart, but it is not fully equivalent: imperatives will not make sense in this case. The underlying biological program is more primitive, more remote from consciousness. This makes the distance between na­ture and tale much greater than with the straightforward adven­ture series. The tale does not spring directly from such origins. The “female fairy tale” is a cultural creation that purports to retrace the steps of nature with the consciousness inherent in a tale.

Who is telling these tales? If we choose Apuleius as a guide once more, we find an old woman retelling the story of Amor and Psyche to a young girl, in a situation of suspense, in the robbers’ house; the tale is to console her, and to prepare her for what to expect. “Old wives’ tales” became proverbial already in antiquity;⁸⁷ they are by no means negligible tradition-bearers in shaping a child’s mental world. Women know about the sequence of menstruation, intercourse, and birth, they can instruct the young, both in a serious and in a playful way. This provides a verbalized sort of script to accompany natural change, handed down in oral tradition, to facilitate the understanding of mem­orable developments while hiding part of them. This produced the narrative structure of the female fairy tale. No doubt it could be retold by males. The tales could even help bridge the gap between the sexes and promote understanding by shared imag­ination, as both sexes share the common basis of life.

An epilogue is due. For many decades, the modern trend in lit­erature has been to get rid of the tale, and the same trend dom­inates the more sophisticated movies. Comics keep traditional elements, but explode them in a continuous fireworks of imme­diate effects. Old-fashioned fairy tales recede, though they may still be used in psychiatric institutions for their therapeutic value. There is no use deploring this development in a changing world, which makes us live with highly sophisticated gadgets in lonely compartments of individual existence. The slogan “stop making sense” is a fitting companion to the demise of the tale.