The stories of oral tradition contain dreams and desires that try to reinterpret realitysometimes redirect it.

Scholars have differentiated the story and the legend in an etymological sense: what is told and what is read; On this occasion we will escape from these and other classifications and analyzes to enter naked into the fascinating world of legend, using as much as possible the same languages ​​that have served to remember the old stories since time immemorial.

through the story Man lives adventures and solves enigmas, becomes a hero, faces love and death and learns to recognize them. Faced with the unique, linear, tangible and exclusive reality in which our rationality tries to establish itself, we can choose, experience and go through stories that open wide to different worlds and that represent alternative truths by the mere fact of being invoked.

But the story has also been vehicle of transmission of wisdom In its purest essence and in all traditions there are good examples. Among the Sufis it is said that these stories can be interpreted at different levels, since they have the capacity to transform the very foundations of human consciousness and free ourselves from prejudices or get in touch with reality and the essence of things.

Stories, haikus and wisdom

Particularly interesting in this context are the stories attributed to the ineffable Mullah Nasrudina whole compendium of wisdom and humor. In one of them, some religious people concerned about the forms and correctness of the protocol, ask Nasrudin:

-Master, during a funeral, do you have to walk in front of or behind the coffin?
-It doesn’t matter -answers Nasrudin-. The important thing is not to be inside.

Much more subtle, the old oriental haiku points out again, through a minimalist story or poemthe futility of norms and precepts:

«A mouse steals food from Buddha’s altar. Chrysanthemum petals rain on his head.»

We could count thousands of stories from all peoples, just considering moral fables and tales of wisdom. But the universe of the story is infinitely broader.

Irish Myths: The Story of Deirdré

Many traditional stories, regardless of whether they have been transmitted in prose, verse or song, fall squarely into the realm of poetry due to their moving beauty and because they celebrate the triumph of love, justice or lifein the face of suffering and adversity.

Some of the most beautiful examples are found in the legendary land of Irelandin which following the old Indo-European custom there were traveling singers and storytellers that brought and carried history and mythology, the collective memory that they preserved and revived in each of their performances.

They sang like this for centuries Deirdré’s Story; national heroine in whom it has been attempted to see a personification of Eire itself:

The warriors hold a feast at the house of Feidhlimidh, a famous storyteller. His wife is about to give birth and, as he crosses the room, the baby inside him lets out a loud scream that everyone listens to, startled.
This unprecedented event is interpreted by the druid Cathbad, who sings a prophetic poem that foreshadows the birth of Deirdré, a woman whose indescribable beauty will bring many misfortunes and fights to the kingdom.
When Deirdré is born, frightened men want to kill her, but King Conchabar takes her under his protection and raises her without allowing anyone to see her, as he harbors the secret desire to marry her when she reaches the appropriate age.
Years pass and Deirdré becomes the sweetest and most beautiful young woman ever seen and remains hidden from the world until one winter day, looking out the window, she sees a crow drinking the blood of a wounded animal on the snow.
At that moment she confesses in an outburst that she will only love a man who has hair as black as a raven, cheeks as red as blood and a body as white as snow.
Leborcham, the nurse, tells him that she knows a man like that; It is about a young and handsome warrior named Noisé who lives nearby.
From here on, destiny seems to collude with the prophecy and Deirdré flees to meet her loved one.
Faced with his doubts, Deirdré pounces on him and grabs his ears: «Shame and mockery will fall on them if you don’t take me with you,» she tells him.
Thus begins a long flight in which the lovers take refuge in the forests and other kingdoms, always pursued by King Conchabar.
Once in Scotland, the king of this country also falls madly in love with Deirdré and they escape to an island lost in the sea.
King Conchabar finally agrees to their return, promising that he will take them under his protection. But it is a cunning trap and Deirdré will be captured while Noisé and his companions are murdered.
For the next year Deirdré did not smile once, she barely ate, drank or slept. No matter how much the king tried to bring him the best delicacies, musicians and minstrels; She always rejected them with the same song: «Every time Noisé prepared food on a simple bonfire in the middle of a plain, in a clearing in the forest, I found it sweeter than any food seasoned with honey.»
Fed up with not being able to obtain her love, Conchobar asks her one day who she hated most in the world and without hesitation the beautiful Deirdré answers that Eoghan, the murderer of her lover.
The king announces that he will send her to live with Eoghan and Deirdré takes her own life by throwing herself against a sharp stone.

Although there are different versions on this point, the most archaic oral accounts conclude that Conchobar ordered that Deirdré and Noisé were not buried in the same grave as the people requested, but separated on both sides of a stream. But the countrymen had planted yew stakes to mark the graves and stakes rooted.

The yews were finally found firmly intertwining their branches and, although Conchobar ordered them to be cut down, the people of Ulster would not allow it and They protected the trees until the king’s death.

Symbol of tradition and identity

Perhaps we lost the root that united us to the tribe and the Earth precisely when we stop listening to the stories of yesteryear. For to a large extent the myth and its transmission were the mechanisms that served to unite and transmit memory, old customs and the meaning of life typical of each town.

Indeed, one of the primary functions of stories and legends was integrate the individual and transmit the messages more or less subliminals that teach the «correct» way to behave in the social or natural context, cultivating the feeling of identity and belonging that give cohesion to the tribe, society, country and the environment that surrounds us.

«The country that no longer has legends is condemned to die of cold.» (Dumezil)

If DNA is the vehicle of genetic transmission, the myth has been one of the most formidable and effective. vehicles of cultural transmission that man has invented. The loss of this reference has made the same principles will be shaken that guaranteed the balance of each community.

In this sense, the analysis he made is very illuminating. Ishilast survivor of the tribe of the yahiexterminated by the push of the overwhelming civilization of the hello (white men) in California: «Perhaps the Saldu are not well taught by their Elders. Perhaps they have forgotten the teachings on their long journey through the deserts.» This is the only explanation that Ishi finds for the behavior of extraordinarily powerful but ignorant and rootless beings, since they do not know how to coexist with their environment.

We can affirm the same at an individual level if we consider, following Robert Gravesthat the baggage of myths is indispensable for the formation of poetic and spiritual thought, to encourage the concept of the sacred.

Stories to open and close worlds

But it is not simply the legends and traditional stories that must be transmitted, but the tempo itself and the atmosphere that surrounds them and makes them pulsating and alive.

In this sense also a newly invented story It can house strength and wisdom or transmit new values, as long as the inspiration and staging are appropriate.

«The word has no legs, but it walks,» says a saying from the Bambara (West Africa).

Certainly we consume myths, stories and legends wholesale, through media increasingly diverse. But this consumption, sometimes compulsive, has little to do with the ritual and the tempo in which a told story introduces us. eat the faut.

At the right time and place, with the right inflection and tone, using the formulas and silences that open and close the magical space (once upon a time)… The story thus becomes a parallel universe that affects the deepest part of our beingand much of the secret that makes these dreams more vivid lies in the transmission itself. This is perhaps the secret that opens a new scenario in a story, pulsating and alive.

Huaiquimill tells the legends that he had collected by drinking from the American tribal fountains, and He stressed the importance of the way of counting them: «When a story is told around a bonfire, the wind picks it up and mixes it with the sand and spreads it in all four directions, so that Anyone can pick it up if they have the ability to listen.. This is how the voice of the wind of the Aymara Indians blows.

Like a seed, the stories remain latent somewhere and they will germinate when the sun and the earth agree. That is why the storyteller must keep in mind that in each of the stories that he opens and closes, there is a journey towards infinity and towards the depths of the storyteller and those who listen; upon whose return all are transformedsooner or later, somehow.

The open circle

Through the story they spread bonds of understanding at different levelsman practices magical thinking and the world is built and explained from a poetic point of view, essential for compensate and balance the rational side.

The myth serves to preserve and cultivate the sacred dimension of memory, of the Earth and of everything that lives on it, including man. And this is the first step in education towards respect and coexistence.

We are obviously not talking about a religious vision in which one must believe and conform one’s life to the myth. It’s quite the opposite, the story brings us closer to spirituality, magic and poetry as spaces that show the world under different aspects and allow us to interpret and experiment in a sensitive, free and playful way.

It is at the end of a life, or in the moments of greatest lucidity and inspiration, when we become aware that a person’s own lifeof a town or a nation, it’s a story big or small, like a story whose script we partly wrote.

On the edge of death, life is a fleeting story and reality a simple dream. Reason declares itself powerless to understand and loses its reason for being.

Until then, all beauty, legend and eternity that we have been able to glimpse in the course of our existence,…