Temptation and Glory in One Pima and Two Aztec Mythologies‪.‬

Sometimes, it is not clear how often, the keepers of tradition in tribal societies organized the whole of their knowledge of ancientness into single oral "books"--books which they might never speak out entirely and which, because of their length and mode of memorization, the keepers could never tell twice in the same words. * These memory-stored pasts were probably under perpetual, even if minor, revision. We know little about the works or the revisions because scholars have tended to study the separate stories that make up the wholes, reading and comparing what were in effect the chapters of the narrators' books. Surely, when literate scholars assemble a whole mythology from a given people, e.g., a Zuni or Aztec mythology, those scholars make the kind of thing we are interested in. But the question is whether illiterate, that is, letterless, Native scholars did so. Actually there is little question that they did. To have a headful of stories must be equivalent to having a quiver of arrows or storeroom of squashes or bag of pebbles. The quantity involved is from twenty to sixty, more than one would have of children but less than one would think of as countless. There seems to be no question that narrators would think of the totality and would reorder and adjust their stories from time to time, even if they never told them all the way through to an audience. The only question is why we know so little about this. My answer is that we haven't had time to know the narrators.