Where People Lived Legends: American Indian Myths

 

This picture is from W. B. Yeats' curious and remarkable book A Vision. Yeats took it from an alchemical work of the sixteenth century, Speculum Hontinum et Angelorum (The Mirror of Men and Angels). What it represents is the cycle of the moon as a counterpart to the cycle of a human lifetime, with the fifteenth night of the moon corresponding to the thirty-fifth year of a lifetime. Using the terms that Yeats applies to this, we are born from the transcendent mystery and immediately the society begins putting its imprinting upon us. The mask that we are to wear is put on us by the society.  Yeats refers to this as the primary mask. 

 

                        The eighth night of the moon is the night of adolescence, of puberty. At that time, light begins to dominate over darkness, and so the attitude of dependency and submission has to be transformed now into one of maturity.  There are two kinds of maturity, however. There is that of a traditional society, where the individual moves over into the role of the authority which has been that of the society. Let's say he becomes the executor, the one who administers the rituals that carry the sense of the culture. He continues in the way of the primary mask. On the other hand, in our culture world we have a more open view. The individual at this time may be able to have the sense of a destiny and a world work of his own of which the society has no notion. We begin to get a separating. 

 

                        The individual begins to find his own path and the drag, you might say, of the primary mask is gradually thrown off. This is what is known as the left-hand path. The right-hand path is that of living in the context of the ideology and mask system - persona system - of one's local village compound. The left-hand path is that of the individual quest. Each of us is an individual. Earlier societies did not pay much attention to this. In our world, particularly in the European world, the individual is recognized as a positive, not simply a negative, power. And so there comes, in our world, the antithetical mask – the mask of the individual's own life, pulling against the other. 

 

                        Even where the youth is encouraged to find his own path, there is nevertheless a psychological lag, so this is a period of great tension. We are not reborn as easily as primitives, or as people in traditional societies. We have a more complicated birth. We come then to the fifteenth night of the moon. Now the image here is of these two great lights: the lunar light, which dies and is resurrected, and the solar light, which is independent of the vicissitudes of time. At this moment, the moon and the sun are equivalent lights. Out on the plains on the fifteenth night of the moon, at the time of sunset, looking to the west, you see the sun at a moment just resting right on the horizon. And if you look there to the east, the moon will be in the same position on the eastern horizon.  I have seen it twice in my lifetime and both times mistook the moon for the sun. 

 

                        This is a moment of great mystical importance. Here your consciousness, your body and its consciousness, are at their prime. And you are in a position to ask yourself, Who or what am J? Am I the consciousness or am I the vehicle of consciousness? Am I this body which is the vehicle of light, solar light, or am I the light? 

 

                        I once had the task of talking about these matters, talking about Buddhism, in fact, to a group of prep school boys, youngsters between the ages of about twelve and seventeen, and when it came to this problem of explaining what this Buddha-consciousness or Christ-consciousness was, I looked up at the ceiling for an inspiration and I found one. I said, "Look up, boys, at the ceiling and you will see that the lights (plural) are on, or you might also say the light (singular) is on, and this is two ways of saying the same thing." In one case, you are placing emphasis on the individual bulbs, in the other you are placing emphasis on the light. 

 

                        Now, in Japan, these two alternatives are called, respectively, the Ge Hokkai and the RI Hokkai: Ge Hokkai, the individual realm; Ri Hokkai, the general. And then they say Ge, RI, Mu Gal: individual, general, no obstruction.  Same thing. Now when one of those light bulbs breaks, the superintendent doesn't come in and say, "Well, that was my particularly favorite bulb." He takes it out, throws it away, and puts another Qne in. What is important is not the vehicle, but the light. 

 

                        Now, looking down at all your heads, I ask myself, of what are these the vehicles? They are the vehicles of consciousness. How much consciousness are they radiating, and which are you? Are you the vehicle, or are you the consciousness? 

 

                        When you identify with the consciousness, then, with gratitude to the vehicle, you can let it go. 0 Death, where is thy sting? You have identified yourself with that which is really everlasting. This consciousness that throws up forms and takes them back again, throws up forms and takes them back again. And then you can realize that you are one with the consciousness in all beings. You are one with them and you can say Ge, Ge, Mu Gal: individual, individuals, no

obstruction. This is the ultimate mystic experience on earth. 

 

                        That's the crisis here. The death and resurrection of the eighth night is death to the infantile ego, birth to the mature. Here is death to the body, identification with the eternal aspect of this in the body, and from then on it's a wonderful thing to watch the body go, following the course of nature.  Until the twenty-second night of the moon, darkness begins to preponderate; the body becomes more and more submissive to the primary rules of the society and of nature. I remember one gentleman asked, when I was talking about this, "When does it happen?" I said, "You'll find out soon enough."  

 

                        Then we have, in the center, these signs indicating the nuclear moment of the crisis. Temptatlo, temptation, the

cup of Tristan and Isolde. Not of Isolde and King Mark, the marriage arranged for by the society, but the awakening of the meeting of the eyes and the awakening of the individual destiny and its realization. Then here is pulchritude, beauty, the glorious moment. Then we come to the decline and violence against yourself, holding yourself in form for the last lap. And

finally, sapientia, the fruit, wisdom.  Not a bad score. 

 

                        And so this also is part of the mythology of the body, the body going through its inevitable course - the long body. In a beaufiful painting by a Swiss artist of the nineteenth century, Bolkin, Death is playing the violin to the artist. That is the serpent bite on the Achilles tendon which opens the two eyes. He is no longer just himself, he is the vehicle of the voice of the muse. 

 

                        The following for me epitomizes the sense of the early man in his relationship to nature. This famous speech was given by Chief Seattle, after whom the city of Seattle is named, around 1855. 

 

The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky, the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the presence of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle. Every sandy shore. Every mist in the dark woods. Every meadow. Every humming insect. All are holy in the memory and experience of my people. We know the sap that courses through the trees as we know the blood that courses through our veins. We are a part of the earth and it is part of us. Perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers.  The rocky crests, the juices in the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and man, all belong to the same family. The shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you our land you must remember that it is sacred. Each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The waters' murmur is the voice of my father's father. The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. They carry our canoes and feed our children. So you must give to the rivers the kindness you would give any brother. If we sell you our land, remember that the air is precious to us. That the air shares its spirit with all the life that it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh. The wind also gives our children the spirit of life. 

 

So if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred as a place where man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow flowers. Will you teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth. This we know. The earth does not belong to man.  Man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web he does to himself. One thing we know, our God is also your God. The earth is precious to Him. And to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator. Your destiny is a mystery to us. What will happen when the buffalo are all slaughtered? The wild horses tamed? What will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills is blotted by talking wires? Where will the thicket be? Gone. Where will the eagle be? Gone. And what is it to say goodbye to the swift pony and the hunt, the end of living

and the beginning of survival? When the last red man has vanished with his wilderness and his memory is only the shadow of a cloud moving across the prairie, will these shores and forests still be here? Will there be any of the spirit of my people left? We love this earth as a newborn loves its mother's heartbeat. So, if we sell you our land, love it as we have loved it. Care for it as we have cared for it. Hold in your mind the memory of the land as it is when you receive it. Preserve the land for all children, and love it as God loves us all. As we are part of the land, you too are part of the land. This earth is precious to us, it is also precious to you. One thing we know, there is only one God. No man, be he red man or white, can be apart. We are brothers, after all. 

 

                        Compare that with Genesis 3. And you see what's happened. Furthermore, the land is the holy land. And the land where you are, not the land someplace else. Not only the body, but the specific landscape in which the people are dwelling is sanctified in these old mythologies. You don't have to go someplace else to find the holy place. 

 

                        And that's the theme that I want to develop. I'm going to take, as the model for this sancfification of the land, the world that we're in here, the world of the Navaho and the mythology of the Navaho and their sand paintings. I want to run through a series of these sand paintings and the mythic matter associated with them. The people of Iceland have a term, land-nam, which means "land-claiming" or "land-tak-ing." Land-taking consists in sanctifying the land by recognizing, in the

features of the local landscape, mythological images. Every detail of the Navaho desert land has been sanctified and recognized as a vehicle of the radiant mystery. 

 

                        In this sand painting what you get are the four directions, the colors associated with each of the four directions, and the center. The center is dark, the abysmal dark out of which all things come and back to which they go. And when appearances emerge, they break into pairs of opposites. This is all basic mythological stuff that we find in India. The sun rises in the east.  It is the place of birth, of emergence, new life. When the Buddha achieved illumination he was facing east. The New Testament is a testament of sunday, the rising of the new eastern sun. In the height of the sky, the blue sky

of noon, is the midpoint, the thirty-fifth year of life. In the west the sun sinks, and in the north the sun is underground. The north is always an area of awe and mystery and danger, the danger of that which has not been accommodated in the forms of the social order. So we see the sun in these various aspects.   

 

                        Now all of these mandalas are open to the east, not closed, open, to receive the transpersonal, the transcendent

light shining through. All things are to be transparent to transcendence. When a deity like Yahweh in the Old Testament says, "I'm final," he is no longer transparent to transcendence. He is not, as the deities of the older cultures, a ersonification of an energy which antecedes his personification. He says, "I'm it." And when the deity closes himself like that, we too are

closed like that, so we're not open to transcendence either. And you have a religion of worship; whereas when the deity opens, you have a religion of identification with the divine. And that was what Christ mentioned when he said, "I and the father are one, and he was crucified for it. Halaj said the same thing, and all of these are saying the same thing. We are particles of that mystery, that timeless, endless, everlasting mystery which pours forth from the abyss into the forms of the world. 

 

                        Just as the animal of the hunter, the animal that is the principal animal of his life, becomes the animal master, so

when planting comes in, the main plants are sanctified also. There are Pueblo myths and Huichol myths in Mexico, telling of the corn maidens. One of them, in one of these myths, is compelled by the young hero's mother to grind the corn, and as she is grinding, her own arms disappear. And she disappears. She is grinding herself away. Our whole life is sustained by the mystery life, and everything that you eat, whether vegetable or animal, is a life that is being given to you through its own willingness to become your own life substance. 

 

                        So all of these mandalas are placed with the east at the top, and it's open. And then there are the guardians of the gate; in this case they are a little figure known as Donso, Big Fly. I'm told that as one walks on the desert sometimes a big fly comes down and sits on one's shoulder. This big fly is the counterpart of the Holy Spirit. It is the voice of the mystery and it is your guide. And it can be called "Big Fly" or in another aspect "Little Wind." And isn't this interesting? It is the wind, spiritus, the spirit, we got in Chief Seattle. That's an archetype, the recognition of breath as the breath of life.

 

                        Just as the plants are sacred, so is the buffalo. This is the buffalo mandala and the surrounding horizon is of mirage. There are two buffalo guardians at the gate and people of the myth stand in the four directions, the central source with Donso figures. And there are also the main plants. These are the corn maidens of the four directions, the corn and the maiden. They appear either as corn or as maiden. Again, in the center, the dark with the crossing of the rainbow, the rainbow miracle. 

 

                        Now I want to go back to the main myth of the Navaho. It's a Pueblo myth as well. It's the one that is universal in this part of the world. It is of the first people having come up from the womb of the earth through a series of four stages, and they go from one stage to another. Some accident happens in the lower stages; a flood comes as a punishment for impropriety of some sort, the breaking of a taboo or something of the sort, and they come on up. And finally they come to the top level, the earth on which we are now. This is really an out-of-the-earth birth. There is a ladder of emergence and the first people are with the plants and the animals roundabout that they discover here, and   there is a special kind of mirage endosing it. 

 

                        At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, some years ago, a team of Navaho singers came to show sand paintings and how they were made, and it was marvelous to watch these men take colored sand in their hands and with great precision prepare these marvelous paintings. When they would prepare them, they would always leave out one detail. Now, when they were given to artists, such as these have been given to artists, to copy and then store in that Museum of the Navaho Art, something will be left out. That is to protect those who are dealing with the painting from its

power. They are not supposed to have the power turned on. Well, they made one painting in the museum and then they were asked, "Couldn't you just complete one painting, complete this one for instance?" and they laughed and they said, "If we finish this one, tomorrow morning every woman in Manhattan would be pregnant." So, these things carry power. It was also interesting to watch them when the paintings were being destroyed, when they were being removed. They took that sand, and the only thing I could think of was a Roman Catholic priest with the consecrated host in his hand. There was sacred power here. They were not just brushed off and thrown away, they were put in a special container and taken somewhere else of which we know nothing.

 

                        So here's the first part of the legend, the legend of emergence. Now I said that in Iceland we have this concept of

land-nam, land-claiming. A specific place is identified on the reservation as the place of emergence. It wasn't the place of emergence; it is the ritual symbol of the place of emergence. And you consider the emergence mystery when you address yourself to that place. There's the mountain of the north and the mountain of the south and the mountain of the east and the mountain of the west. The land is consecrated. It is a holy land in this way. Where did the myth come from? It came with the people to that place. And then they consecrated the place in terms of the myth that was with them. 

 

                        Now I want to go through a specific legend - the legend of "Where the Two Came to Their Father." These paintings are not sand paintings but pollen paintings. They are made of ground-up corn and ground-up petals, flowers, and so forth. When the Second World War started and the young men on the Navaho Reservation were being drafted into the army, there was an old singer there named Jeff King. A friend of mine, Maude Oaks, went down to the Navaho country to learn the legend lore and to make paintings. Well, she had, really, to seduce the old men into giving their stories to her and the thing that persuaded them was the realization that the young men weren't learning these things anymore. These rituals are of one night, three nights, or nine nights. And the singer has to know by heart an extremely elaborate mythology and ritual system. And there must be no mistakes and there is always a second singer to supervise to make sure that no mistakes are made in the chanting. 

 

                        Young men are not putting themselves to learn all this anymore. And so, the rituals are dying out. The plea was that if they would give to the modern anthropologist investigator this material, it would be stored and would be kept as a treasure in the museum of the Navaho. At that time, this is back in the thirties, the normal Navaho family is described as having been of a father, a mother, one child, and two anthropologists. The Navaho was a real hunting ground for the

anthropologist. Well, when a young man would be drafted, his family might go to old Jeff King, who had been a military scout for the American army when they were fighting Geronimo and the Apache. King died in his middle or late nineties and is buried as a military hero in the cemetery at Arlington. Well, Maude got him to give her the rite that he was performing over the young men going into the army. It was an old warrior ritual called "Where the Two Came to Their Father." 

 

                        Having emerged from the underworld, the people were settled in this little place here, and in the four directions are the mountains of the four directions filled with the seeds of all things. This is the house of Changing Woman, a wonderful figure in the Navaho mythology. She was born, miraculously, of a cloud, and she became the mother then of two boys by miracle, by virgin birth. She was bathing at a little spring and the sun shone upon her, and when she came home she gave birth to a little boy. There were monsters troubling the neighborhood and so she dug a little hole and put the boy down there in a kind of under-earth cradle to protect him from the monsters and then went back to the spring to wash herself, and she conceived again, this time of the moon. And so she comes back and here are her two little boys. The boy who was born of the sun is called Killer of Enemies. He is the warrior, outward directed. The boy who was born of the moon is called Child of the Water, and he is the medicine man, the shaman. The twin hero motif is common to many, many mythologies of the world. They represent the warrior chieftain and his magician priest. 

 

                        Well, they are living with their mother and they see that not only their mother but the whole neighborhood is being troubled by monsters and so they think they had better go and get help from their father, the sun. (The sun is ultimately the father of them both, because the sun lights the light of the moon.) Now, their mother had told them, "It's dangerous around

here, boys, and you can go to the east, to the south, to the west, but don't go north." So they go north. That's the only way to get new material. Don't obey the community. They're the ones that are stuck or in trouble. So, guided by Rainbow Man, they go to the mountains, the four corners; everything in the American Indian mythos is in fours. They circumambulate the world and are on their way. Now this is a typical hero quest myth.

 

                        When they come to the end of the known world, that's to say, when they reach the horizon, they are confronted by this threshold guardian whose name is White Sands Boy. He is the guardian at the east. He has long arms. He seizes people and buries their head in the sand and so smothers them. He is the one who sees to it that people don't go beyond the bounds of the mythology. The boys give him praise. They say, "0 wonderful White Sands Boy, there never was a thing in the world like you." And he'd never received such praise in his life, and so he said, "O.K., you can go on." And they make the rounds, there's White Sands Boy, and Blue Sands Boy, and so forth, and now they are beyond the bounds of the world. 

 

                        They're going along in a kind of featureless landscape and they see an old, old woman and her name is Old Age.

And she says, "Well, hello, boys, what are you doing way out here, you earth people?" They say, "We are on our way to our father's house, the sun, to get weapons to save our mother from the monsters." "Oh," she says, "that's a long, long way. You'll be old when you get there. But I'll give you some advice. Don't walk on my path. Walk to the right of it." So the boys start walking along to the right, but then they forget. Heroes always forget. And they are walking on the path again and they begin to feel old and they have to pick up sticks and walk with these and then finally they can't walk at all and Old Age, the old woman, has been watching them and she comes in, "Ah, ah, ah, I told you. They say, "Can't you make us young again?" "Well," she says, "if you'll be careful now, I'll do that," and so she spits on her hands and takes moisture from under her armpits and from between her legs and she rubs it over them and they're made young again. And she says, "Now you stay on the right of the path." 

 

                        So they go along and pretty soon they see another little old lady, a black little old lady. This is Spider Woman.

Now these spiders lived in the ground and this is kind of a fairy godmother, the counterpart of the fairy godmother. She is the spirit of the earth mother itself in the form of the old spider. "Oh, hello, earth boys, what brings you out here?" "Oh, we're on our way to our father, the sun, to get weapons to save our mother." "Oh, that's a long, long trip. You'd better come down into my little house and I'll fix you up for that journey." 

 

                        And so she made the sun go fast (she has power over the sun itself), so that it should set and they'd have to spend the whole night with her. They thought it was a very little hole. How can we fit through that? But when it came time there was no problem at all. They go down and she feeds them certain food and gives them certain pieces of ebony and turquoise to swallow and fixes them up for the journey and tells them what the problems are going to be, that they're going to meet, and she gives them a feather to protect them. "Hold this feather close and you will get through all obstacles," the cactus that cuts, the reeds that pierce, the rocks that clash together, and so on. 

 

                        Well, with these to help, the boys start on their path and they do pass through the obstacles. Standard stuff. We've gone past the known world. Magical help comes to us in the form of some fairy godmother. Ways of the journey are predicted and overcome. The boys then come to the ocean that surrounds the world. That's a standard mythological motif. The Okeanos of the Greeks. We know that it surrounds the world because here are the four mountains of the four directions. In other words, they have translated space into a flat picture. In these pictures, the animals are not rendered naturalistically. These people know how to render all these things naturalistically. They're rendered in the form of their spiritual reference. The transformation of nature in art is rendering the nature phenomenon transparent to transcendence. 

 

                        The boys, with the feather between them, now cross the water by the magic power that has been given them. They approach the house of the sun, which is guarded by four types of animal guardian. First we have the four serpents. The young man who is being trained to be a warrior, having his psychology transformed from that of secular to military consciousness, comes walking in along this line, kneels down here with his head over this basket of yucca suds. He

undergoes a ceremonial washing, a purification; you have purification before you have the revelation, and that's the sense of this rite. There are also guardian bears, guardian thunderbirds, and guardian winds. The boys, having passed these, come to the house of the sun. It's a microcosm of the macrocosm, with the four directions. Here is the sun's daughter, here is the sun's horse. He rides around the world with his sun shield. These are the steps of the boys, and pauses where they meet the obstacles on the way. 

 

                        They arrive. The sun is off on his daily trip and the boys are met by the sun's daughter. She says, "Who are you?" They say, "We are the sons of the sun." "Oh you are, are you? Huh! Well, uh, Daddy's not home now, but when he comes home he's going to make it tough for you, so I'll protect you." And she wraps them in clouds of the four colors and stores them over the doors of their proper color. Over one door she stows Killer of Enemies and over the other Child of the Water.

So in the evening the sun arrives, gets off his horse, comes into the house. He hangs his shield on the wall and goes clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk. Then he turns to his daughter and says, "Who are those two young men I saw coming in here today?" 

 

                        She says, "You always told me you behave yourself when you go around the world. These boys say they're your sons. 

 

                        "Oh they do, do they?" So he searches the house, and he pulls them down and then he submits them to tests. 

 

                        This is a favorite motif in American Indian stories. The father test, or the father-in-law test, or whatnot. He

throws them against spikes of the four colors in the four directions. Flint spikes. They hang onto the feather. They survive. He gives them poison tobacco to smoke. They survive. He puts them in a sweat lodge and tries to sweat them to death. They survive. He finally says, "Well, I guess you are my sons. Come into the next room." So he takes them into the next room. He stands one of the boys on a black buffalo skin, the other on a white, and he tells them their true names and each

acquires his own true character. You remember before they were both black and the same size. Now they're taller and Child of the Water is blue. Well, the description of that moment of initiation in that room, where the thunders come in and lightnings come in, is something terrific, but now they know who they are. This is the second birth through the father, the same thing we've been talking about. 

 

                        When they have survived, they are so powerful they split into four. The yellow is the counterpart of Killer of Enemies and the white the counterpart of Child of the Water. And, now in full power, they start back across the cosmic ocean. They come to the hole in the sky. Now, the feather that they're riding on here is not the one that Spider Woman gave them. It's one their father has given them. Their father, now at the hole in the sky, gives them a final examination.

"What's your name? What's the name of the northern mountain? What's the name of the hole in the earth?" The answers are whispered to them by Big Fly and Little Wind. Now you might say this is cheating, but it isn't cheating. If they weren't worthy of this, they would not have received the inspiration. So, there you are; if you are meant to pass the exam, you'll pass. So, having passed the exam, they come down to the central mountain, Mount Taylor. 

 

                        Now, before they go to work to kill the specific monsters that were troubling their mother, they have to kill the archetypal monster, and he lives by this lake. His name is Big Lonesome Monster. Now, the characteristic of monsters is that they mistake shadow for substance, and so this Big Lonesome Monster sees the two boys reflected in the lake. "Oh, yes. I can drink them up and digest them to death." So, Big Lonesome Monster, mistaking shadow for substance, drinks up the lake and digests hard and then spits it out again, and there they are. He drinks up the lake four times. Now, even a monster's worn out after that performance. And so the boys move in. Now, interestingly, this monster is also a son of the sun. But the sun moves in to help the boys kill the monster - ambiguity about virtue and vice and pairs of opposites and all

that. 

 

                        So the monster is killed and now they are ready to go home. When they come past the foot of Mount Taylor, they trip and lose their father's weapons. They have moved from the realm of sheer male fire into the mixed realm of water, where the fire is mingled with earth. And so they are met by Talking God, who is the male ancestor of the female line of the gods. He is mixed of male and female and he gives them a talking prayer stick made of male and female corn to guide them. They are given double weapons - male and female weapons. And this energy coming from them in the form of flints indicates that they are filled with magic power and they are still riding on the feather. Talking God's mouth and eyes are made of masculine rain and female mist coming up, in this form. His nose is of a corn stalk. He has given them the weapons to kill the earthly monsters. After a terrific series of battles, killing these tremendous monsters, the boys are nearly

wiped out. They're so worn out they've lost their arms and legs and Child of the Water is in danger of just becoming the reflection of Killer of Enemies. And so the gods come down and enact a ceremony over them, and they're given health again. And what do you suppose the ceremony is? It's the one I've just told, the ceremony of their own life story – just as the psychoanalyst leads you back to remember all those things of childhood and to put you on your proper path again.

When they have passed this test and gone through this ceremony, they are, again, four. This is the strongest sand painting of the lot - the four boys, each standing on the mountain of his own color. 

 

                        When Maude Oaks received this ceremony from Jeff King, he omitted this picture. He said, "Well, that's it." Maude said, "No, Jeff, there must be another picture." Now she knew enough to know what was required in those mythological ceremonial situations. "No," he said, "I've given you everything." "No, Jeff," she said. "O.K.," he said, "I'll give it to you. So we've got the whole story here. This is typical mythological adventure. Leaving the bounded world in which you have been brought up, going beyond all that anybody knows into domains of transcendence, and then acquiring what is missing and coming back with the booty - a perfectly beautiful example of this system.  

 

                        This painting was made by a friend of Black Elk. John Neihardt's book Black Elk Speaks is a beautiful book.

Fortunately it was a poet who received this message from old Black Elk, who was in his nineties, of the vision that this guardian of the Oglala's medicine pipe had experienced when he was a boy of nine. The vision foretold, in a magical way really, the destiny before his people. It came to him long before they had had their first encounters with the cavalry and the Battle of Wounded Knee. Old Black Elk, when he was quite a youngster, fourteen or so, participated in the battle against

Custer. At one point in his vision, he said, "I saw myself on the sacred, central mountain of the world." Here he is on the central mountain of the world with the axial tree, and the three birds around about, and Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John roundabout as well. He said the central mountain of the world, the highest mountain, is Harney Peak in South Dakota. And immediately after that, he said, "But the central mountain is everywhere." Now there's a man that knew the difference between the folk cultic symbol and the reference of the symbol. 

 

                        The holy land is everywhere. And so when you come into a landscape for the purpose of the cult, and worship so that you can address your minds to the mystery, designate this is the center, this is the north, this is the south mountain, and so forth. This word of this wise old man reminds me of a sentence, comes from a text of the twelfth century that was translated from Greek into Latin called the Book of the Twenty-Four Philosophers. It says there, "God is an intelligible sphere" - intelligible means known to the mind - "an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere." And so it's right here. The function of the ritual and the myth is to let you experience it here, not somewhere else a long time ago. 

 

                        I would say that there's no conflict between mysticism, the mystical dimension and its realization, and science. But there is a difference between the science of 2000 B.C. and the science of A.D. 2000. And we're in trouble on it because we have a sacred text that was composed somewhere else by another people a long time ago and has nothing to do with the experience of our lives. And so there's a fundamental disengagement. When we look back at that text, it is a text that speaks of man as superior to nature, man's mastery over nature as being what has been given to him. Compare that with the words of Chief Seattle. This is the difference between mythology as a petrifact, something that has dried up, is dead, and is not working, and mythology as something that is working. When the mythology is alive, you don't have to tell anybody what it means. It's like looking at a picture that's really talking to you. It gets to you. If you have to ask the artist,

"What does that mean?" if he wants to insult you, he'll tell you. The myth must work, like a picture. It can be explicated if you've already experienced it, interpreted and amplified, and so forth; but it must work. And we've lost it.

 

                        An article from Foreign Affairs called the "Care and Repair of Public Myths" says that a society that does not have

a myth to support and give it coherence goes into dissolution. That's what's happening to us. He defines myth in an incomplete way. He defines it as an order of acceptable ideas concerning the cosmos and its parts and nations and other human groups. But it concerns also the mystic dimension that informs all this. If that's not there, you don't have a mythology, you have an ideology. It concerns also the pedagogy of the individual, giving him a guiding track to guide him along. And that's what the myth that I've just given you does. It coordinates the living person with the cycle of his own life, with the environment in which he's living, and with the society which itself has already been integrated in the environment.