General Question

Lacroix's avatar

What gods are associated with storytelling?

Asked by Lacroix (537points) February 5th, 2010

I know of Anansi, but what are some other gods that have been known for telling stories?

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14 Answers

Blackberry's avatar

Um, all of them?

lucillelucillelucille's avatar

Bob.The god of bull$h!t.

wundayatta's avatar

Anansi, Coyote, Hermes (well, he’s a messenger God, but he sort of counts)

marinelife's avatar

Mnemosyne was the Greek goddess of storytelling.

qsychoblivious's avatar

Jesus, Mnemosyne, and…PETA, but shhh about that one.

jfos's avatar

Bob Dylan.

Harp's avatar

From the Norse pantheon, Saga is the goddess of “things spoken of’, including storytelling and family histories.

From the Hindu pantheon, Hanuman is the god who recounts the Tale of Rama.

For the Aztecs, Huehuecoyotl was the god associated with storytelling and singing.

SeventhSense's avatar

WUNCAPANOTIME could always get the ball rollin’.

susanc's avatar

@SeventhSense – I looked at this for a long time and realized you’d committed a typo.
It’s “wunsapunatime”. But you’re so, so right, of course.

SeventhSense's avatar

POTATO PATATO
Cimple Simple

Jeruba's avatar

Greek poetry such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey began with an invocation to the muses. There were nine muses, sisters, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (Memory):

Calliope (heroic or epic poetry)
Clio (history)
Erato (lyric or love poetry)
Euterpe (music or flutes)
Melpomene (tragedy)
Polyhymnia (sacred poetry or mime)
Terpsichore (dancing and choral song)
Thalia (comedy)
Urania (astronomy)

The god Apollo who had music, poetry, and the arts in his keeping, was their leader in the Olympian tradition.

In a similar vein, there’s also the popular Hindu god Ganesha.

Looking at the question a completely other way, you could say that Jesus was a god associated with storytelling since he used storytelling as a means of teaching.

I thought the Anansi stories were about Anansi, not that he was a storyteller. If you just mean “Which gods have been told about in stories?” the answer is indeed all of them (as others have said) because that is where (and only where) gods are found at all.

Val123's avatar

All of them.

jfos's avatar

@Jeruba Ganesha is awesome.

Qingu's avatar

Ganesha, seconded. Both of the great Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, were supposedly written by Ganesha as their scribe, as told by their respective sage-authors (Valmiki and Vyasa, iirc).

I think part of the Mahabharata explains why there’s so many stories-within-stories. Ganesha was supposedly such a great scribe that he wrote down what Vyasa said too fast—so Vyasa added all these complex meta-structures to the stories to puzzle Ganesha and slow down his writing.

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