Oracles A-go-go! Making Animist Oracles

Regenerative Culture Social Technology
#18

I think generating the oracles almost constitutes a game in itself!

Better yet, trading oracles with other people!

Reading the oracles for our storyjam got me so revved up I started writing my own right away, sourced from my own waking dream-anteroom full of the surreal undigested crumbs of daily life that constantly litter the floor right at my feet, just to get the feel of it. (Maybe I’ll post it.) And holy cow, the story-bits that felt so stuck while playing (yes, you can call me the reluctant story-gamer, I feel a strange mix of pleasure and pain playing, but I can’t stop! ;)) just started flowing out onto the paper!

Anyway, the process of writing that helped me see my life’s daily story as, whoa, story. Then somehow I started shapeshifting my “real” story into more of a “jam” story–or even a “dream” story. Events that day had thrown me seriously off balance, like “fer chrissakes, why don’t I just jump off a bridge?” off balance. But once the elements took on their new shape as trees, rotting roots, robots, dancing demons, and a torrential rain of tears–re-telling my own story to myself– I could get a grip on my tale in a way I couldn’t in the guise of your everyday, pedestrian gutwrenching drama, and pull myself back together.

So if simply trading out my personal story elements for “another oracle” rocked so hard, maybe my crazy life-story elements could swap out and transform someone else’s life story in the same way. . . by just handing off a “pile of cards”. . . fucking awesome! pokemon therapy for folks-who-rewild!

AND, all this interaction with story starts to blur the line with dreaming. . . I can already feel the fence between dream-time and not getting all melty. Huh. Can story change us that much?

#19

Woah I like it, at first I thought ‘how does one go about coming up with these oracles’ and now, I see I should just recall past events, or tales told to me.

Ex: my brother witnessed a riot, some thugs beating on two helpless people, a multitude of people around, no one doing anything…

my little brother caught with stolen goods…

to personal relationships, the desire of one conflicting with the fear of another…

maybe throw the environment and scenery around…

Know what makes this all really hit with me, not yet even playing, just starting to see all the stories around me

Could story playing have a sort of therapeutic ability, to bring in problems and conflicts at hand, and play around with them?

#20

Yes of course, story allows you to interact with personal issues in a safe even fun environment as well as sharing these issues with people that are close to you. Playing around with these issues seeing them from different angles, different perspectives allows you to come to grip with them and to better understand yourself and your own position.

You can find a rather academic article on RPG’s and therapy here http://www.rpgstudies.net/hughes/therapy_is_fantasy.html

BTW, I love how these story-threads are spiralling down, it seems we all have plenty of stories we want to give shape to. That’s so cool. I go to sleep, wake up and have all this cool stuff to read here!

#21

Ive noticed my last reply didnt contain anything concerning oracles and making them so how bout this.

Personal Grieving Oracle Ingredients

Hearts: personal ache suffered, in story-terms
Diamonds: Persons Places you hold dear / feel safe with
Clubs: Persons Places you feel unsafe with / complicate you
Spades: Ache of Others

Hmm im not that familiar with the oracles yet, this oracle would mean you’d have to take one card of each Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs and Spades, instead of entirely random.

#22

yarrow dreamer, I totally agree, making the oracles is really fun and so different and inspiring. It really frees you from obligations about the rest of the story and all the plot, and just lets you start with the juicy bits.

I really like the idea of taking story elements from your life, I like the way it makes you see the stories, brilliant beautiful, maybe heartbreaking stories in your own world. After all, isn’t that what animism is about, recognizing the stories in our lives and the roles played in those stories by other than humans?

#23

so what do them four card suites mean?

I’ve never studied a deck of cards…
Wikipedia says The suits were based on the four major economic classes on the late middle ages: Spades represented the military, Hearts represented the church, Clubs represented agriculture, and Diamonds represented trade merchants.

Can we rewild this to something like…
Spades: Death, strife, struggle, oppression, liberation, work, land
Hearts:social relationships, turmoil, romance, suffering/joy, spirit,
Clubs represents life, plenty, flora/fauna, ripening, feasts, giving, (and the opposites)
Diamonds: Envy/greed, possession(s), trade, lust

other ideas?

#24

[quote=“Fenriswolfr, post:23, topic:769”]so what do them four card suites mean?

I’ve never studied a deck of cards…
Wikipedia says The suits were based on the four major economic classes on the late middle ages: Spades represented the military, Hearts represented the church, Clubs represented agriculture, and Diamonds represented trade merchants.

Can we rewild this to something like…
Spades: Death, strife, struggle, oppression, liberation, work, land
Hearts:social relationships, turmoil, romance, suffering/joy, spirit,
Clubs represents life, plenty, flora/fauna, ripening, feasts, giving, (and the opposites)
Diamonds: Envy/greed, possession(s), trade, lust

other ideas?[/quote]

Wow. The four economic classes. What a trip! I’ve experimented with making them a know-your-landbase deck:

Spades - Trees
Clubs - herbaceous Plants
Hearts - Four-leggeds
Diamonds - Birds

You’ll notice all kinds of things missing from this schema, fish, snakes, frogs, slugs, lichen, yadda yadda. But as a starting point (one can always add decks!) I liked it. :slight_smile:

#25

[quote=“timeLESS, post:20, topic:769”][quote author=Fenriswolfr link=topic=819.msg9044#msg9044 date=1206252792]
Could story playing have a sort of therapeutic ability, to bring in problems and conflicts at hand, and play around with them?
[/quote]

Yes of course, story allows you to interact with personal issues in a safe even fun environment as well as sharing these issues with people that are close to you. Playing around with these issues seeing them from different angles, different perspectives allows you to come to grip with them and to better understand yourself and your own position.[/quote]

This is what artists do when they make films and plays. :slight_smile:

One of these days I mean to start a thread on staged performance and how it can be melded with ritual ceremony, specifically grieving/healing rituals. But I want to put my thoughts together first…

#26

[quote=“Willem, post:3, topic:769”]Here’s a bunch of stuff off the top of my head that I’ve discovered personally about a deck of playing cards, while experimenting with where the Mythdeck could go:

4 suits: 4 directions, 4 seasons, etc. Classic wise compass stuff.
13 cards in a suit: 13 moons in a year.
52 cards in a deck: 52 weeks in a year.
Black cards/red cards: Day/Night, Yin/Yang, Wet Earth/Breathing fire (i.e. Tiger/Dragon in the Yin-Yang (chinese) and In-Yo (japanese) compasses).[/quote]

Whoa. Shit. The enthusiasm in this thread was beginning to rub off on me, but now I just mentally got up and ran around the block.

What about diamonds representing the earth/land/soil/geologic aspect of our surroundings?

#27

This thread just makes me giggle maniacally and do the hokey-pokey. :slight_smile:

What about diamonds representing the earth/land/soil/geologic aspect of our surroundings?

Yes! And if anybody says no, they have me to answer to! :wink: What a cool idea. You could even have a whole deck just of the earth people - soils, geologies, land-forms, elements.

#28

[quote=“BlueHeron, post:26, topic:769”]Whoa. Shit. The enthusiasm in this thread was beginning to rub off on me, but now I just mentally got up and ran around the block.

What about diamonds representing the earth/land/soil/geologic aspect of our surroundings?[/quote]

Oh duh! I had land under spades but under diamonds makes much more sense!

#29

In story games, you have games with rules that actively address elements of how to make a story, but they take their cue from literary theory: rules about reincorporation, foreshadowing, the three-act structure, and so on.

For The Fifth World, I want to do something similar, but for the rules of orality rather than literacy; and that means first understanding oral tradition as thoroughly as we understand the rules of literature. So I’ve started soaking my brain in stuff about orality and oral tradition. The first thing I came up with addressed the old gamer canard of the impossible-to-remember names. Ever wonder why Homer talked about “fleet-footed Achilles” or “wide-ruling Agamemnon”? Roleplaying games require orality, yet we approach them as if we’d written them down. Epithets would really help alleviate that problem!

So, in that same vein, you have formulas (like “wide-ruling Agamemnon,” “fleet-footed Achilles” or “wine-dark sea”), and you have themes, which basically takes formulas to the scene level. An accomplished storyteller expresses his genius in the range of formulas and themes he has at his disposal, his creativity in employing them, and the recombinations he can put together.

Tell me, does that remind anyone of anything that this thread might talk about?

What do oracles give you if not formulas and themes? A good storyteller relies on recombining formulas and themes from his collection, gathered from a long time of skillful observation and participation with the landscape. A collection just like a good oracle. And a creative recombination, just like pulling cards from the deck…

#30

I don’t exactly understand the idea of formula - what exactly does it do in oral tradition, what purpose does it serve?

#31

Think of it this way: what makes a word? Because we can both read, it becomes very difficult for us to really break past the notion of “that thing demarcated by the white spaces on either side.” But in oral speech, you don’t have white space. You have sound, continuous sound. Think of bird songs, or chimpanzee calls. Linguists say they don’t count as language, because they don’t have discrete, arbitrary elements. Does oral human speech? Try to think of yourself as an outsider, as outside the realm of human speech as you stand from bird song or chimpanzee calls. Or maybe think of people speaking a foreign language that you know nothing about. Can you distinguish words, or do you simply hear a stream of sound? And what about people who study bird song, and begin to distinguish phrases?

Oral formulaic composition extends the “word” beyond “that thing demarcated by the white spaces on either side.” It makes “sea” and “wine-dark sea” likewise single words. A poetic line, or even two lines, could form a single word. So when an oral poet brags that he can recite a massive epic “word-for-word,” he means it, but he does not mean “word” necessarily the same way we do. He actually means something very much like having the right order of oracle cards; he may not read each one precisely the same way we would, but without the attention to precise syntax that writing cultivates, it matters no more to the oral mind than the impossible-to-capture-in-writing-but-essential-in-orality difference of “to-MAY-toe” vs. “to-MAH-toe.”

#32

Okay, let me see if I get this. The formulas basically mean that, to use an analogy, the storyteller doesn’t have to make up his own words every time he tells the story - he can focus on the order of the words instead. Furthermore, like words, the spelling doesn’t have to be exact - you could say a sea as dark as freshly pressed grapes instead of wine dark sea. This means that a storyteller just has to unpack the bones of the story and then can build around those instead of having to remember the entire story-word for word - he knows what each of the words (formulas) means, he doesn’t have to know the spelling (the details) - those can be built up a knew easily each time. THis works in oral tradition because it is easier to remember the broad strokes - the ideas - than the narrow strokes that make the story interesting to listen too. Is that right?

#33

Yeah, I’d say that gets pretty close to the mark.

#34

Cool, that’s a really neat idea, and I could see how it works with the oracles and story games in general. It would allow people to make really interesting stories quickly and to stick to a unifying vision while still adding in their own stuff. Basically, an oracle is a dictionary of specific formulaes that give inspiration and give players something common to refer to. That makes sense, thanks for putting this idea out there Jason.

#35

I agree, it sounds beautiful. :slight_smile: Oracles and Storytelling!

Now, what if we had Oracles entirely composed of riddle-elements, elements in the form of one-sentence riddles!

I must increase the insanity!

#36

Y’know, I thought about having an oracle of riddles for each region…

#37

On a somewhat more mundane note, I started thinking about how I might incorporate oracles with The Fifth World. Playing cards won’t really make for very evocative gameplay in this instance. With my latest ruminations, we have beads, strings of beads, and a “coin” (though I don’t know if it will actually make it all the way through as an actual coin–again, how does that help evoke the setting? But see lukucuko, played by the Hazda by throwing two discs of baobab wood differently painted).

So I started wondering, how can you generate an oracle using a coin?

Kind of embarrassing how long it took me to put that one together, actually…

[The Fifth World] The Structures of Oral Stories, and How to Model Them