In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [17]
Stories and the significance given to them can alter very quickly. Five years after the onset of the Salem witchcraft trials and their resulting deaths, several of the New England judges and divines who had egged on the trials were issuing public repentances. “The Devil was indeed among us,” said one, “but not in the form we thought.” Yesterday’s righteously condemned miscreant can become today’s martyr, and vice versa. It all depends on the story. But stories themselves, of one sort or another, are always with us, and are always moving and changing through time.
We live in an age of intense speculation about stories and their origins and purposes. Denis Dutton, in his book The Art Instinct, proposes the notion that the arts—and also the impulse toward religion—are encoded in our genes. According to this theory, artistic capabilities would of necessity be evolved adaptations, acquired during the roughly two million years the human race spent in the Pleistocene as hunter-gatherers. To have been “selected” in this way, the arts would have had to have conferred some noteworthy benefits on us during those millennia; that is, those who demonstrated such abilities as singing, dancing, the making of images, and—for our purposes—the telling of stories would have had a better chance at survival than those without them. That makes a certain sense: if you could tell your children about the time your grandfather was eaten by a crocodile, right there at the bend in the river, they would be more likely to avoid the same fate. If, that is, they were listening.
During those millennia, so far as we can tell, there was nothing we might now consider a “religion”—a theology with a set of worked-out abstract dogmas and special dwellings set aside for worship, such as temples. Instead, beliefs about the unseen or numinous world were integrated into all life because everything was thought to have a soul or essence. Any action performed would therefore have been deeply significant in a way that we in modern, secular, Westernized society can scarcely imagine. Such a worldview would have been rich and wondrous, but it would also have contained many fears—fear of crossing boundaries, of offending divinities, of breaking taboos. There must have been a very thin line between gods and monsters.
Vestiges of that worldview linger in the early literature that has come down to us. Greek mythology abounds with stories in which people are transformed by gods into natural beings such as animals, birds, and trees; and, in return, such natural entities often speak to or communicate with people. It’s noteworthy, too, that in the biblical Book of Exodus God does not appear to Moses in human form; instead he is a voice emanating from the well-known Burning Bush—a bush that is in flames but is not consumed. The bush itself is not God in physical form but an angel or messenger: the narrator of this story is taking care to avoid trapping or limiting God, because a God confined to or circumscribed by a physical object such as a bush—however sacred, inflammable, and loquacious—would be a God that was potentially destructible.
What does the voice say? Among other things, it says that its name is I AM THAT I AM, or possibly I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE. God is a sort of gerund, a noun-verb, and the burning bush that is not