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.

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Thus, the novelist Louise Erdrich describes her experience of a storyteller among the
Tewa Pueblo, recounting how the earth came to be:
[A] traditional storyteller fixes listeners in an unchanging landscape combined of
myth and reality. People and places are inseparable. The Tewa Pueblo, for example,
begin their story underground, in complete darkness. When a mole comes to visit,
they learn there is another world above and decide to go there.… But the sequence of
events that the storyteller unrolls over the hours … is the plot but not the story. For
its full meaning, it should be heard in the Tewa language and understood within that
culture’s world view. Each place would then have personal and communal
connotations. At the telling of it we would be lifetime friends. Our children would
be sleeping or playing nearby. Old people would nod when parts were told the right
way. It would be a new story and an old story, a personal story and a collective story,
to each of us listening. (Erdrich 1985)
If we can describe this immersive weaving-together of audience, environment, teller,
and time as a kind of power, then in an analytic sense that power arises from a series of
performative conditions, from the authority of the teller to the timing of the event to the
responsiveness of the audience. But it is a power, an efficacy in the experience of people,
during and beyond the event, that impels them to listen, recall the stories and characters,
remain rapt, and discuss the stories afterward. (See Roger Abrahams’s discussion of these
performative dynamics in Abrahams 1976.)
If most traditional cultures have several such narratives carrying this kind of power—
that bind people, that are retold regularly at certain seasons or events—the Jewish religion
inherited one story in particular, whose importance and power lie both in the requirement
that it be retold and in the effect it is meant to have on listeners. This is the Passover story
of the Israelites’ escape from Egypt under the leadership of the prophet Moses. While
rendered in literary form almost 3,000 years ago (Exod 1–15), the narrative came with the
instruction that the story be remembered and retold to children at a particular time each
spring associated with the ancient Pesach festival (Exod 13:3–10, 14–16). Today,
elaborated with commentaries and digressions of various eras and reset as its own separate
text (the Haggadah), it is often difficult to get at the central story: an ancient drama of a
people’s deliverance. But the retelling of that drama at an annual ceremony is meant to
inspire the same kind of identification, familiarity, and intimacy that Erdrich describes
with the Tewa narrative. The narrative takes on an efficacy—it “works” on people,
exerting power over them—not simply because it is performed ceremonially but, more
importantly, because it must be retold (and thought about) in order to reconstitute the
social group.
In some cultures, the telling of such key stories, narratives that undergird tradition and
values, assumes an even more formal character. In India, any retelling of the Ramayana, the
great epic of the god Rama’s heroic exploits, serves as a ritual event with broad efficacy.
Performed from memory by trained specialists, the recitation of the Ramayana brings merit
to the financial patron of the performance and to those who listen. And “listening” is not
just the imaginative participation in characters’ exploits but a type of darshan: that is, the
transformative beholding of sacred events and things that bring special blessing in South
Asian religions. This efficacy in the recitation of Ramayana holds whether smaller portions
are recited for entertainment at festivals or whether a classic version is sponsored as the
central event, or even when, in contemporary India, the Ramayana is broadcast on
television. Then people will purify themselves before broadcast, and television sets are

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festooned with flowers and turned into altars with offerings placed before them. It is not just
the visual form of television that inspires such enthusiastically ritualized responses but
the fact that the sacred epic—the narrative itself, with all it embodies about gods, heroic
values, and culture-making events—is emerging into the world for the darshan of
believing people. (On performances of Ramayana, see Graham 1987, ch. 6; Lutgendorf
1995).
This function of central narratives, told or enacted to bless the observers, sanctify a
ceremony, or (as in the case of Passover) mark a holy day, has been central to western
Christianity as well. If today many churchgoers might look forward simply and nostalgically
to a Christmas “pageant” performed by children, in the medieval and early modern periods
the public narration and reenactment of Christmas, Palm Sunday, and Good Friday legends,
as well as innumerable saints’ legends, were essential to the life of religion; and their
witnessing by all was essential to the well-being of communities. Since the calendar itself was
conceptualized according to the narratives of the Christian Gospels and of saints local and
official (whose own narratives reaffirmed the multiple blessings a community could expect),
holy days and festivals in Christian Europe revolved around the efficacious performance of
key stories. Today, one can encounter life-size donkeys on wheels (for Palm Sunday) in
museums, life-size corpses of Jesus (for Good Friday) in some churches, and large wooden
images of saints and apostles with moveable limbs. These artifacts of public performance are
all we have to conjure the processional, staged, or professionally recited narratives of holy
days and their central stories.

“MYTH” AND ITS APPLICATIONS

Is there a name for this kind of story, whose recitation, often by experts, is essential for
reconstituting and blessing communities, for sanctifying a holy day, and for interconnecting
ancient traditions and collective memories with the world of the immediate community in
its landscape? Such vital stories are often designated “myths,” whether they involve gods,
heroes, saviors, ancestors, or primordial animals. As other chapters in this volume explain,
myth often denotes the paradigmatic function a narrative serves in society: for example,
framing or explicating attitudes to neighboring peoples. But the characters, the creative
forces, the victories, and the time of myth—separate yet impinging on history—all seem to
carry special powers that people feel acutely when these elements are invoked through
narrative. When archaic precedents and heroic ancestors are invoked to sanction a new king,
for example, it is not that the king is simply legitimated but that the whole force of
tradition—of ancestors, founding stories, and cultural values—recasts the man on the throne
as the very embodiment of the mythical king and the coronation time as shot through with
the vitality and importance of mythic time.
Yet myth, properly understood, is not a particular type of narrative but rather a source
for narrative: a kind of repository of power and authoritativeness that can be represented in
various narrative forms and performative settings and that people draw into their world and
experiences through telling certain stories in certain ways. Myth is that quality of certain
narratives—paradigmatic, foundational, ancestral, and so on—that allows them to convey
blessing and efficacy through various types of performance. So far this chapter has addressed
those narratives that bind groups and sanction festivals, that convey myth in its broadest
scopes, but there are narratives that convey more specific blessings, too. Stories of the battles
of ancient heroes, gods, or angels might be told in the context of preparing for warfare: not

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just to excite soldiers but to bring down on the soldiers the blessings of these narratives of
mythical victories, along with the special songs or prayers that the heroes themselves once
uttered. Stories of Jesus’s healing miracles, whether quoted from the Gospels or summarized
(or improvised), recall his acts in ancient times in such a way as to imply their abiding
mythical potency in the here and now.
One of the most interesting examples of this focused or delimited recitation of mythic
narrative is an obstetrical incantation used by Cuna shamans in Panama in the early
twentieth century, described and discussed by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-
Strauss (1963). The incantation, meant to facilitate labor, describes the journey of helpful,
human-like spirits up to the domain of Muu, a goddess responsible for forming the fetus but
also capable of disorder and arrogance. The narrative describes the various monstrous beings
that the helpful spirits conquer en route to Muu. But the narrative also symbolically follows
the route of the birth canal up to the uterus, progressively opening it up to the descent of the
infant. Lévi-Strauss interprets the narrative as
recreating a real experience in which the myth merely shifts the protagonists. The
[helpful spirits] enter the natural orifice, and … the sick woman actually feels them
entering. Not only does she feel them, but they “light up” the route they are
preparing to follow— … to make the center of inexpressible and painful sensations
“clear” for her and accessible to her consciousness. (Lévi-Strauss 1963, 194)
This use of myth in childbirth is not just a matter of therapeutic visualization, however:
as myth, the narrative of Muu and the helpful spirits, chanted over the woman in labor,
exerts authority over her consciousness and those attending her. The recitation of this
narrative, in this way and by an authoritative shaman, thus conveys efficacy to the body of
the woman. Even if the labor results in tragedy for woman or infant, we would expect that
the shaman’s versatility with myth would cast the death in such meaningful terms as well.
Myth, then, is a repository of authoritative traditions that certain people can draw upon,
improvising through narrative in some type of performance in order to influence a situation.

MYTH AND THE HISTORIOLA

In early and medieval Christianity, the Bible itself often served as the narrative repository for
magical stories, and scribes in every culture would copy passages that might have this same
kind of effect on people’s crises. It was generally thought that stories—the scripture
passages—and even their very letters, if properly applied to an ailing person, would bring the
powers of the biblical God or Jesus (as described in the passage) to that person. Each of the
passages in this section that refer to Jesus was written in early Christian Egypt for private
use. For example:
Curative Gospel according to Matthew. And Jesus went about all of Galilee, teaching
and preaching the Gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease {and every
disease} and every infirmity among the people. And his fame spread into all of Syria,
and they brought him those who were ill, and Jesus healed them. (Meyer and Smith
1994, 7)
Written out in the form of a cross, the amulet (from fifth-century Egypt) begins by
declaring the Gospel of Matthew as “curative”—as a healing text—and proceeds to a passage
from that Gospel (Matt 4:23–24) that enumerates Jesus’s healing acts. The implication is
that Jesus’s mythical healing acts—those enumerated in the Gospel—should transfer by

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means of the writing (or incantation) of the words into this world in which the amulet’s
bearer is suffering illness.
But as with the versatility of the Panamanian Cuna shaman in the obstetrical
incantation, so the experts who wrote out these scripture passages to be carried as personal
amulets held such conviction in the larger myth of Jesus’s powers that they too could
innovate—they could declare stories of Jesus in their own words, directed to some situation
before them: “Christ was born on the 29th of Choiak [Christmas]. He came by descending
upon the earth. He rebuked all the poisonous snakes. Your word, Lord, is the lamp of my
feet, and it is the light of my path” (Meyer and Smith 1994, 55). The final scripture phrase
(from Psalm 119:105) indicates the mythical value of Jesus’s “rebuke” to snakes—as God’s
Word—as well as the receptivity of the bearer of this amulet to its blessings.
Yet another text involves utter improvisation on the authority of Jesus as a mythical
healer:
Jesus our Lord came walking [upon] the Mount of Olives in the [midst] of his twelve
apostles, and he found a doe … in pain … in labor pains. It spoke [to Jesus in these
words]: “Greetings, child of the Maiden! Greetings, [firstborn of your] Father and
Mother! You must come and help me in this time of need.” He rolled his eyes and
said, “You are not able to tolerate my glory, nor to tolerate that of my twelve apostles.
But though I flee, Michael the archangel will come to you with his [wand] in his
hand and receive an offering of wine. [And he will] invoke my name down upon [it]
with the name of the apostles, for ‘whatever is crooked, let it be straight.’ [Let the
baby] come to the light! The will of [my heart happens] quickly. It is I who speak,
the Lord Jesus.” (Meyer and Smith 1994, 49)
These types of mini-narratives, called historiolae (sing. historiola, Latin for “little
story”), are improvised for the purpose of directing myth toward the crises of everyday life
(in this case, childbirth). We find them in charm-collections from early, medieval, and
modern European Christianity as well as in folklore across the history of religions. They
construct narratives around the most important mythic (often scriptural) characters, usually
to sanction some type of healing or protective event in this world. If considerably
abbreviated in contrast to the more public narratives discussed in the beginning of this
chapter, this narrative of Jesus and the doe is rich in characters and dialogue. It even
integrates a healing substance, wine (blessed by Michael); and the speaker himself (most
likely) is recast as Jesus at the end. Other historiolae integrate the patient as well: “Jesus
Christ heals the chill and the fever and every disease of the body of Joseph, who wears the
amulet daily and intermittently” (Meyer and Smith 1994, 11). The language here is
narrative, of a mythic act completed: it is not an appeal or invocation (“Jesus, please heal
Joseph!”).
It is important to recognize that such local improvisations on the central narratives of
religion have been acceptable and customary on the part of reciters and ritual specialists, not
deviant or “heathen.” The versatility of the specialist, priest, or healer in improvising
historiolae from myth is boundless, as we see in a toothache spell from ancient Babylon that
draws on the same narrative of creation as the great epic the Enuma Elish: “After Anu had
created the heaven, (And) the heaven had created the earth,” the spell begins and follows
this sequence down to the creation of the worm. The worm proceeds to declare his
preference for teeth and jawbones instead of the figs and apricots offered by the god Ea, at
which point Ea declares, “Because thou has said this, o worm, May Ea smite thee with the
might of his hand!” (Heidel 1951, 72–73). Then the text gives instructions for how to recite

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the spell and what to put on the tooth. Thus, the recitation of the story of the creation of the
world serves to heal the tooth.
These historiolae oriented toward healing draw from the same repository of stories and
divine characters as “official” public recitations of foundational stories—at temples and at
festivals, for example—because a suffering person, whether in labor or plagued with a
toothache, needs the powers that only the most authoritative mythic narratives can convey.
Ancient Egypt provides us with one of the richest ranges of narratives meant to be recited
over patients to bring the powers of myth into the world of healing. One of the most
elaborate examples, preserved in one version on a stone stela in New York’s Metropolitan
Museum of Art, is the story of the goddess Isis and her child Horus. When Horus is stung
by a scorpion, Isis seeks “magic” from the other gods to cure him. But like all historiolae,
this narrative is not meant to entertain but to heal through the sequence of images and
incantations and through the power of the recitation. The text begins by poignantly
emphasizing Isis’s maternal bond with her child:
I am Isis, who had been pregnant with her fledgeling, who had been expecting the
divine Horus. I gave birth to Horus, the son of Osiris in the nest of Khemmis.… I
concealed him, I hid him for fear of [his uncle, Seth].… I spent the day gathering for
the child and taking care of his needs. Having returned to embrace Horus, I found
him—the beautiful Horus of gold, the innocent child … his body limp, his heart
weak, while the vessels of his body did not beat.
I uttered a cry, saying: ‘it is me!’—But the child was weak beyond answering. My
breasts were full, but his belly was empty, (though) his mouth was eager for its
food.…
To whom among men shall I call that their hearts may turn to me? (Borghouts 1978,
62–63)
The story continues as various characters try to diagnose Horus’s suffering: “A lady of
distinction” suggests: “‘perhaps a scorpion has been stinging him, or a greedy snake
has been biting him!’ And Isis put her nose into Horus’s mouth, to know the smell
from the inside of his body” (Borghouts 1978, 64). Realizing the cause, she cries out
in lament:
“Horus has been bitten! Oh Re, your son has been bitten! Horus has been bitten, the
heir of an heir, the lord who would set forth the kingship of Shu! …
Horus has been bitten, the beautiful child of gold, the innocent child, the fatherless
one! …
Horus has been bitten, the one who was anxiously cared for in the womb, who was
(already) feared in the belly of his mother!
Horus has been bitten, the one whom I eagerly awaited to see, and for whose benefit
I loved life!”
The innocent one wailed in distress, and those around the child were depressed.
Then Nephthys came weeping, her cries ringing out in the marshes.… And Isis sent
her voice to heaven, her cries to the bark of millions. (Borghouts 1978, 64–65)
At this point, Thoth (god of writing and magic) descends from the celestial boat of the sun
god Re and inquires what is wrong. Isis reports, “See, Horus is in distress on account of
poison! … Death is its final destruction,” (Borghouts 1978, 65) to which Thoth declares he
has brought down the breath of life. The narrative concludes with a long incantation that
links Horus’s healing with that of a suffering patient in this world:

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The protection of Horus is the Lion of the

night who travels in the Western Mountain.—
And such is the case with the protection of the
sufferer.
The protection of Horus is the great hidden
Ram who travels about in his two eyes.—And
such is the case with the protection of the
sufferer.…
The protection of Horus is his own body. The
magic of his mother Isis is his protection.—
And such is the case of the protection of the
sufferer.…
The protection of Horus are the lamentations
of his mother and the cries of his brothers.—
And such is the case with the protection of the
sufferer.
The protection of Horus is his own name. The
gods serve him while protecting him.—And
such is the case with the protection of the sufferer.
Wake up, Horus! Your protection is lasting!
Comfort the heart of your mother Isis!—The
words of Horus relieve the hearts. He reassures
the one who is in distress.… Recede, poison!
See, you are conjured by the mouth of Re, you
are averted by the tongue of the great god.
(Borghouts 1978, 66–67; emphasis added)
While we only have this story in versions
written on stone or papyrus in hieroglyphic char-
acters—illegible to most people in ancient Egypt— Stone stela from an Egyptian temple, c. 350 BCE.
the text bears multiple indications of its origins and Described in the hieroglyphic inscription (and depicted in the
image) is the story of the goddess Isis seeking a “magic” cure when
regular use in oral performance: that is, uttered over her child Horus is stung by a scorpion. This narrative is not meant
the body of someone in great pain and danger from to entertain but to heal through the images and incantations and
a scorpion sting or snakebite. The act of narrating the power of the recitation. A magic potion could even be created by
this story of how the gods resolved this crisis in poring water over the stela. PETER HORREE/ALAMY.
myth brings the power of myth into the healing
situation. In fact, so potent were these stories of the
gods (and the incantations the gods pronounce within the stories) that inscribing the
words on stone stelae, with an image of the child Horus himself standing victorious
on crocodiles and grasping scorpions and other beasts in his hands, allowed the stories
to acquire a material power that could be “washed off” with water poured over the
stela. The water became a healing potion, imbued with the narrative of Isis and
Horus. (On this story and its physical forms and uses, see Podemann Sørensen 1984
and Ritner 1989.)
These various examples illustrate the range of ways that stories, recited in ritual
situations (often healing), could be used to bring the power of myth into direct application
to a crisis situation. In all these examples, it is the recitation itself that acts on the situation,
not a verbal reference to the story (such as: “O Isis, as you once healed Horus so heal this
patient here!”). The power resides in or comes from the story itself.

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These dynamics reappear in ritual speech through history: a historiola charm from
modern France, for example, narrates how “Saint John and the Virgin Mary were passing
on their way, ‘John what do you hear there?’ ‘I hear a child coughing.’ ‘Saint John with
your breath you heal (patient’s name).’ In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Ghost, Amen” (Davies in Roper 2004, 105), while a famous charm from medieval
England sings:
Jesu that was in Bethlem born
And baptised was in Flum [river] Jordan
And staunched the water upon the stone,
Staunch that blood of this man: [name here], Thy servant,
Through the virtue of Thine holy Name Iesu
And of Thy cousin sweet Saint John,
And say this charm [X] times with [X] Pater-noster [“Our Father” prayers]
in the worship of the Five Wounds. [emended from Olsan in Roper 2004, 75]

HOW CAN A STORY CONVEY POWER?

So far we have seen a variety of narratives convey powers of myth into situations in the here
and now: community-binding stories told at the right time, long epics of heroes formally
recited to bring blessings, abbreviated historiolae of Jesus’s healing powers told and inscribed
to conjure those same powers for today, and longer retellings of the acts of great gods
directed to individual crises. But what can we mean by the “power” or magic of telling
stories? We now turn to the mechanisms of the power of narration.

MYTHIC RESOLUTION
Myth offers a sense of authority and recognizable tradition, as we have seen in all the
examples above. The characters, whether gods, spirits, Jesus, or saints, are well known in
the culture for their heroic and creative acts, and their cultural importance and potency as
narrative actors are paradigmatic. This is one basic feature in the power of these narratives.
The recitation of the stories over the suffering patient (as we saw in the Cuna shaman’s
healing story) recasts the very experience of the body as the site or analogue of mythical
events.
But there is a more specific feature in the narratives meant to heal: their depiction of
a crisis resolved. It is not just that the mythical events are relevant to the crisis before the
healer but that, while the human crisis is open-ended (will this child die of a scorpion’s
sting? Will this woman die in childbirth?), the mythic dimension comprises dramas that
have been completed and tensions that have been resolved. This is the central function of the
healer’s recitation and that motivates and influences the composition of her or his
particular story. It involves laying out a crisis resolved, using the authoritative
components of myth in an efficient, abbreviated way. Hence, we can grasp the ingenious
improvisations on the official narratives we find in some charms, like the story above of
Jesus and the pregnant doe. Though Jesus never dealt with childbirth in the canonical
Gospels, as a mythical figure who heals he must have the capacity to resolve a difficult
childbirth. The story only has to be told in such a way that his healing powers in this
direction are laid out as precedent and as a narrative depiction of the suffering
successfully healed.

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PERFORMATIVE UTTERANCES AND ILLOCUTIONARY ACTS

Another dynamic in the efficacy of narrative comes from the study of ritual language itself.
Ritual language always seeks to situate powers in the environment of the ceremony, not to
describe scientifically or to express a wish or to entertain. For a priest to pronounce “Christ
is risen!” on Easter Sunday is to make a declaration of a mythical reality that he sets in action
each year through that pronouncement (and associated forms of ritual speech). Thus, for an
ancient Egyptian healer to pronounce that “the protection of Horus [is] the lamentations of
his mother.… And such is the case with the protection of the sufferer” (Borghouts 1978,
67) acts both to declare Horus healed of the scorpion sting in myth and to declare the
transferal of this healing to the patient in the here and now. To declare is not to describe or
to make a scientific judgment but to transform an existing situation—to let language
become a ritual tool that works to change reality within the ritual environment. Likewise, a
character’s command within a historiola has a function equivalent to the declaration, as in
this charm for a wildfire from early modern England: “Christ he walketh over the land, /
Carried the wildfire in his hand. / He rebuked the fire and bid it stand: / Stand, wildfire,
stand! / Stand, wildfire, stand! / Stand, wildfire, stand! / In the name of the Father, Son, and
Holy Ghost” (emended from Roper 2004, 136).
Philosophers of language call this kind of speech performative utterances, in which the
use of words is the main part of a social act. And among performative utterances they
designate these kinds of declarations illocutionary acts. Illocutionary acts cover all the
multiple areas in life where couples are “pronounced” married or Passover matzah is declared
“the bread of affliction,” or the Eucharist is declared “the body of Christ,” or even, in
children’s play, a little boy is designated “the daddy” and the doll “the daughter.” A
transformation takes place through the use of words. As philosophers such as J. L. Austin (in
his aptly titled How to Do Things with Words [1975]) and John Searle (1975) have observed
in this kind of speech, the efficacy of the declarations depends on the appropriateness of the
circumstances, on the authority of the speaker to make such a declaration, and on the
participation of the audience in recognizing the transformation. Otherwise the declaration
becomes false, parodic, playful, or annoying. Scholars of ritual, like the anthropologist
Stanley Tambiah (1968, 1973) and the Indologist Wade Wheelock (1982), have found the
model of performative utterances enormously helpful for understanding ritual language—
the descriptions, declarations, and even the ways that narratives are conveyed in ceremonial
speech. Ritual language invariably strives to transform the ceremonial environment through
illocutionary acts that rename ceremonial objects, furniture, and participants in the terms of
myth. Matzah “becomes” the bread of affliction, and those seated around the Passover table
“become” those who escaped from Egypt. A sword, a small fire, a cup of wine, a dish of
food, a white goat, a cheap English translation of the Bible all become mythical objects,
characters from ancient narratives, the tools of the gods (or, in the case of the translated
Bible, the Holy Word of God) through illocutionary acts whose efficacy is assured in the
context of the ritual.
Although narrative itself is not an illocutionary act, those covered in this chapter are
certainly performative utterances, since it is the telling that conveys power and transforms
audience and environment in ways similar to declarations. But because narrative
accomplishes this conveyance of power without actual declarations, one might categorize
it as a perlocutionary act, where transformation (like healing or protection) occurs through
(per-)—by means of—the utterance or recitation (locutio). In the case of the Cuna
shaman’s obstetrical narrative, it is the progressive narration in a way that symbolically

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pertains to the subject’s experience of her birth canal that allows her to experience an
opening-up of her body in labor. The story of Isis and the suffering Horus does contain
declarative words toward the end, yet the narrative’s attention to Isis’s own crisis
demonstrates that perlocutionary efficacy could act on the sufferer’s mother and audience
as well.
Thinking about storytelling in terms of performative utterances and their effects
opens up for us the ways that recitation, the invocation of mythical characters and events,
and even the alternation of speech types (narrative, incantation, declaration, appeal) can
bring power into the performative situation: to bless, to heal, or to galvanize group
commitments.

AUTHORITY AND IMPROVISATION: THE SPEAKER

The third mechanism behind the power of narratives is the authority and position of the
speaker him- or herself. Austin and others have described the efficacy of the performative
utterance as depending largely on the authority of the speaker to issue such a declaration.
Occasionally, we find the speaker recasting him- or herself through declaration as a mythical
character—a god, a saint, or a spirit: “I am that Thoth,” an ancient Egyptian healing spell
pronounces, “that physician of the Eye of Horus, (he) who contended for his father Osiris
before Neith, the mistress of life” (Borghouts 1978, 49). “It is I who speak, the Lord Jesus,”
concludes the historiola about Jesus and the doe, not to aggrandize the speaker but to shift
the agency behind the spell away from the speaker, to Jesus.
But more often the speaker’s authority derives from skill in the kind of improvisation
from myth that we have discussed, especially in her or his inheritance of specific traditions of
powerful narratives that implicitly connect the speaker to the story. This is what the
anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski described as the “tradition of magic” (Malinowski
1954, 74–76). The wielding of magical power for healing or cursing or ceremonial blessing
amounts to a performative skill. Storytelling abilities, specific incantations, and a confidence
in the role of expert are all handed down in family lineage or elaborate training in that role.
The creation of efficacy through the recitation of mythic narrative thus comes down to a
specialist’s performance and its particular ritual setting.
Among the ways specialists demonstrate their versatility with myth and narrative is to
include ritual materials in the composition of historiolae. For example, a love spell from
Roman Egypt begins with a dramatic narrative of Isis “who came from the desert at noon in
summer, dried up by dust, her eyes full of tears, her heart full of sighs.” Thoth, her father (in
this story), asks what is wrong, and she tells him that Osiris her husband is sleeping with
Nephthys, the goddess. Thoth instructs her, then, to go south and find the coppersmith:
“Make him produce for you a double iron nail with a thick head and a subtle leg, with a
firm tip and of light iron. Bring it before me. Dip it in the blood of Osiris. Hand it over, and
we will appeal” (trans. Satzinger 1994, 214–215), following which the text shifts to an
incantation, charming the body of the love object in real life. Here it is probable that a real
nail dipped in blood or red fluid served as a ritual implement in the ritual performance,
which the specialist wielded as a kind of material fulcrum between the world of myth and
the world of human application. The presence of the nail here, or in other historiolae the
presence of an egg or a potion or a bone, anchors the myth in the ritual situation. We can
attribute the choice of these material elements and the narrating of stories around them for
ritual purposes to historical specialists, oral performers, even when the actual sources we
have for these narratives are on ancient papyrus or stone or collected in ancient manuscripts.

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These ritual objects signify efficacy—the tools for success, as it were—as well as the material
presence of myth itself.
The specialist might draw other elements of the environment into the narrative,
likewise to become fulcrums between myth and real-life situations: the patient him- or
herself (as we saw above in the spell for “Joseph, whom Jesus heals”), places in the
immediate environment, and of course the speaker or healer, who recites stories by lineage.
When he or she pronounces the central incantation or declarations of the story, it emerges as
a mythical force, often from the voice of a mythical character.

WHAT IS POWER?

In the end, what is the power that narratives can convey? We can say they are efficacious first
in the perlocutionary sense explained above: through the dynamics of performance and
audience response they bind people with heritage, traditions, and landscape; they sanctify
times through their appropriate recitation or performance; and they are thus experienced as
conveying something variously described as blessing or merit to audiences. Second, as
performative vehicles for myth, narratives convey the magic, the supernatural powers, that
cultures tend to attribute to myth, directing that magic into the crises and ceremonial
situations of this world. As the dimension of precedent and paradigm, of heroism and
salvation, myth exerts an authority over life, and we may call the exertion of that
authority—even the desirability of that authority—a kind of power that can be directed.
Finally, in consideration of the performative context, we may say that the reciter, healer,
ritual specialist, or master storyteller establishes social power by controlling, via narrative,
the terms by which tradition is understood there and then, in the performative
environment. That is, to tell how Jesus met a doe in labor pain, or how Isis was in grief
over Horus’s sickness, or how helpful spirits battle their way up to the domain of Muu is not
to provoke a discussion about legendary characters to which everyone brings up his or her
own versions. Rather, the narrator enthralls the participants, dictates the terms of myth and
the direction of tradition, and thus creates the totalizing circumstances whereby mythical
resolution is the only way for patient, subject, and audience to think.

Summary
This chapter discusses the ways that narratives, publicly recited, can transmit power in a
religious or magical sense. It begins by looking at the importance of specific stories in
galvanizing groups, blessing holy days, and bringing fortune and merit to audiences. Many
of these stories have a “mythical” or paradigmatic value for religions or communities, but
much briefer stories also seem to convey mythical power, often for specific crises in life. The
chapter examines a series of “historiolae,” stories of mythical characters told to transmit
healing power to someone suffering. Historiolae draw from official as well as more
improvised versions of mythic narrative, representing cultures from ancient Egypt to late
antique Christianity. The chapter concludes by examining three mechanisms by which
narratives can be efficacious in ritual: through their representation of crises resolved in myth;
through the capacity of ritual language to transform situations; and through the authority
and versatility of the reciter or ritual specialist. The chapter also addresses what is meant by
“power” as conveyed from mythic narrative.

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