ABSTRACT
Memory is sometimes seen as a mainly inner phenomenon taking place in individual minds. But what a memory stores, how it organizes its content, and the period of time for which it stores a specific content, is not only a question of individual cognition, but also of external, social and cultural frames, according to recent insights in both cultural and cognitive theory. This article wishes to examine the interrelations between cultural and autobiographical memory and the role of religious narrative with respect to this problem, focusing on explicit means for transmission of cultural memory to individuals in the Exodus narrative of the Hebrew Bible. The thesis is that the Exodus narrative offers an example of how a religious medium may affect the mind. In the Exodus narrative, questions of memory, ritual, narrative and the fantastic are intricately interwoven. For that reason it constitutes an interesting area of study in relation to the current debate in the cognitive study of religion revolving around the questions of the transmission of counterintuitive representations and belief. This paper is a contribution to this important topic. In the following, I introduce the two perspectives employed in this article, current theories of cultural memory and theories on the fantastic from contemporary literary criticism, after which I will proceed to the case study.
