CHAPTER 7 Narratives That Do Things David Frankfurter Professor, Department of Religion Boston University Many cultures regard particular stories as not only essential to hear at certain times of the year but efficacious: as capable of blessing the hearers, bringing together the community, and acting in some positive and material way on the audience. At the same time, ancient manuscripts, as well as students of living cultures, such as folklorists, give evidence of healers and other ritual specialists adept at improvising on official religious narratives, at telling stories about healings and victories that often use those same principal gods but in this case to heal or protect individuals. How are stories thus envisioned as acting on people, as transmitting a kind of magical power? In this chapter, we look at the essential religious features of the performance of narrative and how recitation itself is traditionally imagined as bringing a power into the world. We look at the category “myth” as the repository of ideas, values, traditions, and heroes in which a magical power is imagined to reside and from which expert storytellers weave narratives in performance. And we look at the category historiola, the “little stories” that ritual specialists recite as the mythical basis of ritual efficacy—a story that narrates power, as it were, into the body of a suffering patient. When they tell, or inscribe, or most often sing historiolae, they conjure the magical powers of the heroes of these stories and direct them to their clients’ predicaments. THE POWERS OF STORY At some point in your life, you have probably had the experience of someone—a grandparent, perhaps—reading or telling you a story that drew you in entirely. Whether in horror or humor or sheer drama, you felt transfixed through the teller’s (or reader’s) voice, intonations, and familiarity, as much as the plot itself. You wanted to hear it again—not to read it online or get a recorded version, but to be immersed in the presence of the story as told by that particular person in real time. Today, television and other video media have largely displaced this social, “real-time” experience of stories. Even if we get absorbed (sometimes for many hours if we “binge watch” television series), our absorption is isolated from time, space, and (usually) people. The “magic” of the spoken story lies in the capacity of the teller to bring together audience and environment, things we know and traditions we recognize, and the seductive authority of the teller her- or himself, who can seem to be weaving the story out of the wisdom of earlier generations. 95 COPYRIGHT 2017 Macmillan Reference USA, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning WCN 02-200-210