Feeling Narrative Cultures: Analyzing emotions in religious narratives with examples from old-babylonian ninurta myths

This chapter develops strategies for analyzing the role of emotions in religious narratives as a form of cultural analysis and discusses how this contributes to understanding narrative cultures. It presents a transferable, narratologically-based method for analysis of the narrative treatment of emotions, and it discusses which roles emotions play in the narrative imagination of the ancient Mesopotamian deity, Ninurta. The strategy of analysis for analyzing emotions narratologically presented here includes analyzing 1) verbalized emotions, 2) emotional story effects, and 3) the overall levels of stimulation of emotions across a narrative or a set of narratives. Examples are drawn from Old-Babylonian, Sumerian Ninurta compositions and contextualized within Mesopotamian narrative cultures. The aesthetic perspective on emotions and narrative allows us to investigate religious stories in a way that does not over-determine which response is or should be elicited, but investigates how the narratives—and religious narrative cultures—cultivate different emotional responses. The article suggests avenues for analyses of how religious narratives move religious participants, how they make the superhuman characters engaging and relevant, and how they cultivate sensibilities and emotional norms and practices.