THE STORY OF ONE-TWO MAN
ROBERT A. JOHNSON
I would like to tell you an American Indian folk tale, the story of One-Two Man. That curious name, One-Two Man, will be explained as we go along in the story. I choose an American Indian tale for a specific reason. Dr. Jung was of the opinion that the soil we stand on has a mythology of its own. The American Indians have, so to speak, impregnated the American soil. Just the fact that we occupy this land over which American Indian stories have been told and the American Indian collective unconscious has reigned for many, many years gives it a special quality which affects us. Americans of the present day dream a great deal about Indians because of that archetypal connection which seems to soak up through the soles of their feet and imprint itself in their unconscious.
This tale is a particularly engaging one. It has in my experience the unique distinction of being something I have never read. I have never been able to find this tale in any writing, or document it anywhere. I simply heard it once. The story impressed me so much that it is indelible in my mind. There is a particular pleasure in hearing a tale this way because this is the manner in which folk tales are propagated. One hears them from a storyteller somewhere.
One-Two Man, a boy, is an orphan, and he is being raised by his grandmother. Granny is doing very well with him. He is happy. One summer, when One-Two Man was in the tenth, eleventh, or twelfth year, he went to his grandmother and said, “Granny, I’m bored and I need something to do. Tell me something to do.” And Granny said, “Why don’t you go out and dig roots, potatoes, and tubers, things that grow in the ground, and make a collection of them?” One-Two Man thought this was a grand idea. So he went out and spent the whole summer digging and collecting a great pile of roots, tubers, yams and such things. By summer’s end, it was a great, impressive pile. Every day he took Granny out to show her the great pile of yams he had dug. He was totally absorbed in this, and was delighted with it.
One morning in the fall, he went out to add to his pile of yams and found they were all gone. Not one remained. There was just a bare spot where his precious pile of tubers had been all summer. He burst into tears at this, dashed in to Granny and said, “Granny, what’s happened? Somebody has stolen all of my yams. They’re all gone.” Granny, already knowing this, was very sober, and she said, “I have a story to tell you. I’ve kept it from you for as long as possible so that you might be old enough to understand.” Then she told him how it was that he had been orphaned.
It seems that an evil medicine man, called Old Stoneshirt, had used his medicine man’s powers for evil purposes, for magic. He was so powerful that he had become the terror of the whole land. Because of his evil ways, he had grown about himself a stone shirt. With this stone shirt around him, he was completely impregnable to any arrow or hatchet, or any other instrument, and no one could defeat him. Because of his evil ways and his stone shirt, no one could bring him down.
One day, Old Stoneshirt had taken a liking to One-Two Man’s mother, had killed One-Two Man’s father, abducted the mother and would have killed the child. Something intervened, and the child made his way to Granny to be raised. And Granny, telling the boy this sober tale said to him that the spirit of his dead father had come during the night and swept away the pile of yams. He said, “My son no longer may do such feminine things. Now he is old enough to grow and take his place as a man in the tribe. So I have stolen his roots and tubers, and now I will teach him the art of manhood. Please instruct my son to come to my grave and learn what I have to teach him.” So Granny instructed One-Two Man to make his way to a particularly fine oak tree nearby, go to the north side of it, dig only a little way under the surface of the ground and uncover his father’s bones. This One-Two Man did very gingerly and with care. He found the bones of his father, then sat before them wondering what to do next. He dozed a little, and the spirit of his father rose up from the dead bones and gave him the following instructions: “You lie on my bones and go to sleep, and you sleep for four days and four nights, and I will instruct you in the ways of a man. I will show you how to use bow and arrow, and tell you what you need to know to track the deer and the antelope so that you will be a great hunter, and I will instruct you in the ways of a warrior.” One-Two Man did this. He went to sleep on his father’s bones. He slept for four days and four nights and in dream received instructions for becoming a true warrior.
At the end of four days and four nights he woke up, was full-grown, and had become a strong man, knowing all the arts of manhood—how to hunt the deer and the antelope, how to protect himself, and how to be a warrior. He had been given a shield and bow and arrows, and was now a full-fledged brave. Immediately he announced, “I am going to go and rescue my mother.” Everybody warned him against this. Then the spirit of his father came again and said, “There is one more thing you must do. You must dig further into my grave, set my bones aside, and there beneath them you will find my hatchet, my stone ax. This ax was given to me by my father, and it, in turn, was given to him by his father. Now it is yours. You take it to your grandmother and instruct her to cleave you into two parts with one great blow from this stone ax. She is to sink the ax into your head with a blow so great that it will travel clear down through your body and divide you into two men, each of whom will live and be strong. Your name will then be One-Two Man, because you will be two people: number one man and number two man.”
One-Two Man, now understanding his name, went to his granny, presented the ax and instructed her as he had been told. At this, Granny burst into tears and said, “I cannot do it; it’s not possible. I love you too much to give you a blow like that. It would be certain to kill you.” One-Two Man explained this was his father’s instruction and that she must do it. Since anything from the spirit world is revered in Indian land, Grandmother took up the ax, and with all of her strength, cut One-Two Man into two people. (And these two people function for the rest of the story as one individual, though they are twins. We hear no more about the split than this. What is such an agonizing thing for us when we split, is easy for the Indian, and it is only recorded that it happened.)
One-Two Man now insists again that he is going to rescue his mother. But Granny tells him, “No, you must not. Old Stoneshirt cannot be defeated.” She explains that Old Stoneshirt lives in a cave and keeps his mother at the far end of this cave, and that the cave is guarded by an antelope with an eye on the end of every hair, whose eyes are never all asleep at the same time. There is no way of getting past this guard at the entrance to the cave, no way of getting by an antelope with an eye on the end of every hair. More than that…Old Stoneshirt has two daughters from a long distant marriage, who are excellent bow and arrow marksmen. If they draw bow and shoot arrows, they never, never miss. Granny says, “Even if you got by the antelope, you would be killed by the arrows of the daughters. And even if you got by the antelope and the daughters, Old Stone shirt is impregnable, and cannot be defeated. No arrow and no hatchet can penetrate the stone of his shirt. So you must not try to rescue your mother.” But One-Two Man said, “I’m going anyway.” And off he went.
As One-Two Man was walking, he happened by a lake, and there beside the lake he found his mother who had been given a few moments of fresh air. One-Two Man told her of his plan to kill Old Stoneshirt and rescue her from the cave. She warned him against this and begged him not to try, but he was not to be put off. He said, “Mother, while I am doing this, you stand by the lake and you look far out into the water and don’t you bother me. When I have put an end to Old Stoneshirt, I will come and get you.”
One-Two Man then called together the animals of the forest. Since he was an extraordinary man, he was friends with all the animals. Bighorn sheep came, wolf came, coyote came, rattlesnake came, and mouse came. He made a council of war with his friends and told them what he wanted to do. They all advised him not to try this, because Stoneshirt could not be beaten. But One-Two Man said, “I will do it anyway.” Since the animals were his friends, they said, “Yes, we will help you, though our advice is not to try.”
So they made a council of war. Bighorn sheep came and brought a bowl of water which never ran dry. That was bighorn sheep’s contribution. (Since this is a Paiute Indian story, and the Paiutes live in the southwest of the U.S., a supply of water is essential for any project undertaken in the desert lands.)
Wolf talked a great deal. Coyote, in his wiliness, talked slyly and had all manner of tricksterish plans for how they could succeed with this. Rattlesnake never said anything, and mouse was hardly to be seen. So they talked and they talked. They talked for days and they talked for weeks. There was so much talk. Wolf talked mostly; coyote talked in between, then both would talk each other down. And there was more talk, and still more talk. Rattlesnake got weary, and mouse disappeared and wouldn’t have anything to do with all this. Yet more talk went on. They discussed what to do with the antelope with an eye on the end of every hair, and it seemed there was no way to get by him. Finally, rattlesnake got so exasperated by this endless talk between wolf and coyote that he wriggled off unobtrusively, slithered unnoticed into the cave by following very close to some rocks on one side, found the antelope, struck at it and killed it. Rattlesnake came back, announced what had happened, and wolf and coyote immediately got into an argument as to which of them had produced the master plan by which all of this had happened.
So the talk resumed. Wolf had a big plan, and coyote had a very ingenious, tricksterish plan, and the talk began all over again, more days and days and days of talk. Finally, mouse came to his wit’s end with all of this. Early the next morning he crept off unnoticed, got into the cave by a little hole somewhere, and found the two bows of the two daughters. Mouse gnawed the rawhide bowstrings almost through, though not quite, so the bows still looked strong and effective, but the moment they were drawn, the bowstrings would snap and the arrows would be entirely ineffective. Mouse came back and announced what he had done, and wolf and coyote got into a fierce argument as to who of them had masterminded it.
Now there was still Old Stoneshirt to reckon with, but nobody knew what to do with him. No one had an idea. Of course, this did not deter wolf and coyote in the least. They just went on talking, and they talked and they talked and they talked and they talked. Finally, rattlesnake got completely at the end of his limits with all of this. Quietly, on his own, he had begun to observe that Old Stoneshirt came out early each morning and went to a particular place in the meadow to answer the calls of nature. So one morning, rattlesnake went out and coiled himself under a reed just at this place, and as Old Stoneshirt went out to relieve himself early one morning, rattlesnake bit him on the backsides and killed him. Rattlesnake came back. Wolf claimed the victory. Coyote argued that no, it was he who had masterminded this. One-Two Man then went off, found his mother by the cave, announced what he had done, and the story comes to its end with happiness in the forest again.
This is a particularly lovely story, simple in its concepts, direct, open, and very Indian. It has a wealth of information in it, and I would like to philosophize for just a while on the meaning of some of the symbols and episodes in the story.
Whenever a boy is raised by his grandmother, and the parents are not present, or the parents are weak or they pay no attention to the boy, a particular kind of character develops. As one knows, the parents both mediate the collective unconscious to a child but also protect him from a too intense contact with it. If one has parents of child-bearing age, one has very human people to relate to. Father is busy with the earning and mother is busy with the household things, and one’s relationship to the great principles of the universe is mediated to one by some immediate people, not too far distant in age from oneself. But if a boy is raised by a grandparent, especially by a grandmother, he turns out to be a special kind of person. Even if his parents are alive, though perhaps not protecting him adequately, this happens more and more now in our society.
If a boy is raised by his grandmother, she will tell him folk tales, she will reminisce, she will talk about the timeless things. Her view of life is older, deeper, less immediate than the parents’ view. Maybe she is from the old country and tells stories of a land as she remembers it, or she prepares the special foods, or knows the language or the legends or the history or the heritage of that people. She has a wholly different focal point on life, a wholly different view of things. It’s ideal for a boy to have a mother who connects him with the here and now, and a grandmother who connects him with the far, deep places by way of story, reminiscence and reflection.
A boy who has been raised in this manner is different from other boys. He has a different perspective, a different attitude. A boy who has been nourished by the world as his grandmother sees it is already an old man before he starts. He turns into a special kind of man as well, because he has the whole collective unconscious in him, full-force, with almost nothing to mediate between him and it. Inevitably, this either turns him into a casualty so that he succumbs to illness or psychological difficulties or some psychosomatic problem — or he takes the heroic path and learns to make his way through the archetypal world. Such a man becomes a teacher or a healer or an artist or a seer or a man of the inner world. These seem to be the things that are open to a man who has been thrust deeper into the unconscious than perhaps is wise for a human to go. The very thing that gestates a hero, or makes an extraordinary person, a person of high creativity, always nearly swamps that character in the process.
Sometimes, when a man comes for treatment, one discerns that the collective unconscious has rushed in upon him during his upbringing, and that he has scarcely survived the encounter. Generally, it is very therapeutic to tell such a person, “Look, you have a choice now between illness and the heroic way. How do you want to go?” When one knows this, has sufficient differentiation, and can see different patterns, then it is quite possible that one can rise up and say, “I will embark, I will embrace the heroic way, and will set aside the whole quivering way of illness.” This is possible to do if one has the consciousness to do it. People who are particularly at home in the inner world, who know something about the heroic way, are likely to have come up in this manner. It is always nip and tuck when a hero or highly creative person is being evolved, and it always takes much time.
I find it most interesting that Lao-Tzu, perhaps the greatest of all the legendary Chinese masters, was said to have lain a full eighty years in his mother’s womb, then was born white-haired, speaking wisdom. He was the man who stayed a long, long time in the collective unconscious. He survived it though, and he became a master instead of a casualty.
It is generally true that One-Two Man characters always grow up slowly, and need a far longer nurturing time than do ordinary boys. A One-Two Man at age eighteen is only just beginning to venture out into the world, and he may be into his thirties or even his forties before he gets some power. Probably it is no news to you that I was raised by my grandmother, so many of these things are particularly at home with me.
When one is growing up, and the archetypal world is perilously close to the boy who is being raised by a grandmother, it is a very good thing to go and dig in the collective unconscious and collect roots. Any boy goes through a collecting phase somewhere before his teens or in his early teens. This is the root collecting instinct in us. If one is close to the collective unconscious, he will collect up great piles of roots. Call them whatever happens to be the hobby of that boy, they are the roots of the earth. A boy saves himself by this collecting instinct at a particular time in his life. When you find a fifty-year old still collecting roots, and the pile grows higher and higher and higher, something has gone slightly amiss. But root collecting is a normal way and a good way for a boy to grow. One hopes that at some point the spirit of his father, or his godfather, or another source of inspiration, or simply the native strength of the boy himself will come and sweep away his rather feminine occupation of root collecting, and help the boy understand that he has now to grow into the world of manhood or grow ill, one or the other. Here, the way of initiation is particularly beautiful. One goes to the bones of one’s father for instruction, and in the course of four days in one’s sleep, one is made a whole and strong man. This is absolutely true, One might just have to add a zero or two to the four days, but essentially it is true.
Then comes the cleaving in half. This is most extraordinary. No one could describe this particular moment in the development of a human being quite so eloquently or so directly as the One-Two Man story. It was this in the story that first caught my attention. One-Two Man, now full-grown, is cleaved in half and becomes two people.
Carl Jung writes in his autobiography about his own number one personality and number two personality, and I have no reason whatsoever to think that Jung ever heard the story of One-Two Man. But listen to the similarity of language. This is from his Memories, Dreams, Reflections:1
“The play and counterplay between personalities No. 1 and No. 2, which has run through my whole life, has nothing to do with a ‘split’ or dissociation in the ordinary medical sense. On the contrary, it is played out in every individual. In my life No. 2 has been of prime importance, and I have always tried to make room for anything that wanted to come to me from within. He is a typical figure, but he is perceived only by the very few. Most people’s conscious understanding is not sufficient to realize that he is also what they are.”2
Number one was Jung’s immediate ego personality, and number two was the wise old man who lived in him and spoke the ancient wisdom of the collective unconscious. Another quote from the same volume: “At that time (when Jung was in his teens) it would…have been beyond my power to formulate my feelings and intuitions in any graphic way, for they all occurred in No. 2 personality, while my active and comprehending ego remained passive and was absorbed into the sphere of the ‘old man,’ who belonged to the centuries. I experienced him and his influence in a curiously unreflective manner; when he was present, No. 1 personality paled to the point of nonexistence, and when the ego that became increasingly identical with No, 1 personality dominated the scene, the old man, if remembered at all, seemed a remote and unreal dream.”3
What an extraordinary description of One-Two Man! Or perhaps One-Two Man is an extraordinary description of somebody like Dr. Jung.“… No. 1 wanted to free himself from the pressure or melancholy of No. 2. It was not No. 2 who was depressed, but No. 1 when he remembered No. 2.”4
You see, we have much more trouble, we Westerners, with the split in us than did the American Indian. It had only to be done to the Indian and that’s the end of it. That’s the last we hear. But for us, this split into number one and number two, the inner and the outer, or the light and the dark or however it splits with one, is very painful and is likely to occupy us our whole adult life. Another quote: “No. 2 had no definable character at all; he was…born, living, dead, everything in one; a total vision of life. Though pitilessly clear about himself, he was unable to express himself through the dense, dark medium of No. 1, though he longed to do so. When No. 2 predominated, No. 1 was contained and obliterated in him, just as, conversely, No. 1 regarded No. 2 as a region of inner darkness.… About this time I had a dream which both frightened and encouraged me.
It was night in some unknown place, and I was making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. Dense fog was flying along everywhere. I had my hands cupped around a tiny light which threatened to go out at any moment. Everything depended on my keeping this little light alive. Suddenly I had the feeling that something was coming up behind me. I looked back, and saw a gigantic black figure following me. But at the same moment I was conscious, in spite of my terror, that I must keep my little light going through night and wind, regardless of all dangers.
When I awoke I realized at once that the figure was… my own shadow on the swirling mists, brought into being by the little light I was carrying. I knew, too, that this little light was my consciousness, the only light I have.… Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light. This dream was a great illumination for me. Now I knew that No. 1 was the bearer of the light, and that No. 2 followed him like a shadow. My task was to shield the light and not look back… this was evidently a forbidden realm of light of a different sort.”5
Later in his life, Dr. Jung paid more and more attention to number two personality, but only after number one was strong enough to stand the impact of it. And that, about as briefly as one could imagine, is the interior history of a man. He is split. Our Garden of Eden story is the equivalent of that split. A man develops the number one personality, the little light one holds in one’s hands, one’s consciousness, until it is strong enough, and then he turns around and faces that great, great shadowy region which is his number two personality. And when the two finally make peace with each other, that is one’s enlightenment or one’s redemption. This is put so succinctly and so attractively in the story of One-Two Man, who asks his grandmother to split him in two that he might become a warrior.
Now Stoneshirt is a fascinating figure. He is the medicine man who had used his magic powers wrongly, had used them for his own gain, for his own selfish purposes, and because of this had grown stoneshirted. This is an eloquent description of certain people not unknown in our culture and eloquent of a bit of oneself, for everybody has at least a little bit of Stoneshirt in him. Of course one recognizes it most quickly in other people, but having done that, one might venture the far more difficult task of recognizing it within oneself. One can make some observations about the Stoneshirt character, of what it is in one’s own psychology.
Using inner power for evil shows the difference between magic and religion. Magic is the exploration ofnature. Religion is the cooperation with nature, with earth and instinct. We have a choice as to how we are going to use our magic, which we call science. A man becomes a stoneshirt if he eradicates wonder and mystery and insists on understanding everything rationally or in a calculated way. If he dominates nature too much or tries to use nature for his own wishes or his own ends, he becomes a stoneshirt. Invariably, stoneshirts are too materialistic and hold too concrete an attitude. They are inflexible. Stoneshirts are embarrassed to be awed by anything—a prevalent stance now among many groups of people. The stoneshirt attitude is to “be cool,” though of course this is just a modern form of sentimentality.
Stoneshirtedness is a cold, hard, inhuman attitude immune to any kind of penetration by someone else’s ideas or point of view. Nobody can touch a stoneshirt; he is the man caught in a power play who is deaf to anything but his own ideas and opinions. Such a person is insensitive, rigid and uncreative. Because he cannot adapt to anything outside himself, he remains sterile and insulated. Stoneshirts murder their sensitivity to other people, thus the murder of One-Two Man’s father and the attempted murder of One-Two Man himself.
If one lives out the process of individuation consciously, he becomes strong inside and gentle outside, but if he does it unconsciously, he becomes hard outside and soft inside, thus a stoneshirt. If you find a gentle and courteous man, you have probably found a very strong person. It takes strength inside, where it belongs, to be gentle outside.
Even though stoneshirts have been trained away from feeling and warmth, they often get desperate and then go plunging into such things in an all-out way. You recall that Stoneshirt kills One-Two Man’s father and takes his mother, the feeling value. This is too much for him to live in a natural way, so he makes a prisoner of her. This is stoneshirted power psychology which works on the principle, sometimes brutal, that it is easier to change others and the world than to change oneself. Stoneshirts are very naive about all this. They will pull all manner of power tricks and then wonder why they are not loved.
It is a curious thing that stoneshirts want passion; that is, they steal the mother. But they refuse commitment; that is, the child. Stoneshirts are men who refuse their responsibility for nurture. They kill the father principle and then abandon the child. They will have nothing to do with being father. Instead they leave it to the schools, the radio or the television to be formative elements for their children. Yet when stoneshirts in the power-driveness try to legitimatize their ways or to justify their cause, they become very sentimental people.
Power, stoneshirtedness, is extremely infectious and will rush through the unconscious of groups of people like an epidemic. Such is the symbol of Old Stoneshirt. He plays this out to perfection. He is the isolated one and he is the lonely one.
Remember that One-Two Man told his mother to go and stand by the lake and look out over the water while he did his heroic task? A hero always has to get his mother complex set a little off to one side while he is off to conquer the dragon, or else the softening effect of his mother complex will get in his way and he will not be able to perform his specifically masculine duty. I was lecturing about this to a group of people one day and a woman came up to me afterwards. She said, “Now I know what my son is doing. He’s telling me to go and look out over the lake while he grows up and becomes a man, and now I think I can do it for him.” She had been meddling all the time. One has to tell one’s mother complex not to meddle at precarious moments in one’s heroic way. Mothers must understand this. They must go for a walk by the lake at judicious moments so far as their son is concerned. He will come back later.
Now, on to the cave. Have you ever heard so eloquent a description of paranoia as an antelope with an eye on the end of every hair? Do you know people who are like that? These are the jumpy people, the touchy people who seem to have so many eyes everywhere, all poised to catch something. They can always see something go wrong and you can’t get by them, ever. Mostly they see the negative things of the world and they are constantly on guard. We all have an antelope sitting around somewhere with an eye on the end of every hair. These are the touchy moments or days or points in us.
The daughters who wield the bows and arrows which never miss, are the perverted feminine side of the stone shirt personality. When a man goes stoneshirt, his feminine side inevitably goes along and becomes the arrow wielder, and she is accurate to a terrifying degree. As a stoneshirt becomes rigid, the femininity goes hard in another way. Invariably, it turns moody; stoneshirts are always moody people. If one’s boss is a stoneshirt—and it seems so many stoneshirts turn into bosses—one will come to the office one morning and find the air is fairly blue with the mood of one’s boss. One waits half a day, or maybe one waits several days for that arrow to be released—when the mood suddenly will have accumulated enough force so that there will be an explosion somewhere and the whole office trembles. This is the moodiness of the stoneshirt which wreaks havoc around him, especially to anything feminine near him. It is most likely to fall on a woman or fall on the feminine part of life. Stoneshirts have a curious kind of respect for each other but they are deadly to women. If a man is a stoneshirt, his anima is likely to take on the characteristics of the two daughters described here.
One-Two Man has access to the animals—to the instinct world, but Old Stoneshirt’s contact with the animal or instinctive world is perverted. This is the antelope. But there is also the bighorn sheep. The sheep is a symbol of hope and salvation, a kind of Great Mother who offers a nourishing bowl of water which never runs dry. The sheep carries the feminine value which makes it possible for the heroic party to have the nurture it needs in striving for the masculine or spiritual value. This is such a beautiful gift from the world of instinct, from the animal level of oneself.
Wolf and coyote embarrass me, and I am sorry to own up to them as some not very useful masculine characteristics. As soon as one talks a great deal and makes big plans, one knows that one is in the wolf and coyote world and not much is going to come from it but bragging. One hears this so often in other people. Though should one have the ears to hear one’s own too much talk echoing off the walls, there is available to one the rare genius of being quiet. The first inkling I have that I’m inflating, to which I’m inordinately subject, is to hear my own voice bouncing off the far wall. Other people may have been hearing it for the last half-hour, but finally I can hear it in the tone of my own voice. Wolf and coyote.
Rattlesnake, who is the hero, is a very interesting character. In our story, rattlesnake does not talk. He simply waits, he looks, he listens, then glides out imperceptibly and does his work. It is he who can silence the antelope with an eye on the end of every hair, and it is he who knows the way to Stoneshirt.
One can tell so much about a person from the condition of his snakes or his relationship to them in his dreams. The snake means so many things, but more than anything else it is our capacity for evolution and transformation. The snake occupies a place midway between earth and the heavens. It is a fact of nature that all the birds in the world are descended from snakes, and their feathers are the evolution of the scales of the reptile. So the snake is the ideal intermediary between the darkest cthonic part of the earth and the highest flights of heaven.
Wherever the snake appears there is the capacity, yea even the demand for evolution. If a person is on bad terms with his evolutionary capacity, the snakes in his dreams will be hostile to him. They will frighten him or they will chase him or he will wake from a nightmare just as the snake strikes at him—meaning that his capacity for evolution has become so taut and so urgent that it will get him even at great pain. If the interior snake has to come and be hostile to you, it is resorting to urgent and extreme means to drive you where you need to go.
If you are on good terms with your evolutionary possibility, have done your work and kept current with the growth which is possible to you, then snakes appear in dreams in a friendly way. One’s snake may be the white cobra, or it may be the snake which speaks wisdom, or the snake which is the guide, or it may be the snake which curls itself up and makes a geometrical pattern for you, foretelling the mandala of your life. Or it may be the uroboros, that curious snake who turns around and bites his own tail, making a circle. Should the uroboros appear symbolically to one, this is the beginning of the wholeness of one’s life. But most of us are not on very good terms with our snakes, which means we are not on very good terms with the evolutionary demand which springs up from the depths of us. So it is really the snake which pulls one through the impossibilities of one’s life, a kind of cthonic wisdom that knows what to do.
See what happens when the snake turns up in the Garden of Eden! The world is never the same again. The snake comes and puts an end to the idyllic situation and naïveté of the Garden of Eden. As much as one might regret it, this sets the whole process of redemption in motion. It was said that God, having set the snake in the Garden of Eden to begin with, was bounden in his duty to mankind to send a redeemer to free us from the effects of the snake. This is the fall of man described in Catholic liturgy as the felix culpa, the happy fall. Before they excised it from the liturgy, this was part of the ceremony for the Saturday evening before Easter Sunday when new holy water was prepared for the coming year. The font of old water is made dry and cleaned; then new water is put in. A candle is lighted and the butt end is thrust three times into the font, to make new holy water. Then there is a line said by the priest until it was excised: “O happy fall that was the occasion for so sublime a redemption.” This is the nature of the snake in us, and it is the nature of the snake in the Garden of Eden. O happy fall that was the occasion for so sublime a redemption. If you are working with a snake, please remember this: The snake is the carrier of evolution. More than anything else, it is the demand for growth and advancement.
Now to the daughters, and the mouse. This is very puzzling. Somebody of genius has suggested that the mouse represents the capacity for doubt, the capacity for wondering. The mouse is so defenseless. It is such a tiny part of oneself. Yet it is the mouse who disarms such a lethal character as the two daughters. One could say that a bow ready to spring forth its arrow is a device for storing energy. As one pulls the bowstring, one accumulates energy which can be loosed all of a sudden, in one fatal rush of energy. This is the anima tactic one sees so often in tortured, stoneshirted men. If, instead, a stoneshirt can entertain some doubt and come off his inordinate sureness of himself, if he can sacrifice his stance of being absolutely right or absolute law, no energy can accumulate for an arrow to be thrust like that. If one will allow one’s mouse to creep around and entertain some views opposite from the majority, this is a very good sign and is often the beginning of wisdom. Doubt, of course, is not a very comfortable thing. One would rather be confident, cocksure, and go off with bravado, but one should take one’s mouse along because it will save one from some of the excesses to which man is so prone. The mouse in our story gnaws almost through the bowstrings, making them incapable of holding the big sum of energy which could send forth unerring arrows.
Even Stoneshirts have human sides to them, and they sometimes have been known to go off to the bathroom early in the morning. Even the most confirmed stoneshirts will have moments of humanness, ordinariness or earthiness. If you have a stoneshirt to cope with, there is almost no use to hammer on his chest and try to make your way through the stone. You can wait though, until there is a human moment. Then there is the possibility for an evolution.
The snake belongs as much to Stoneshirt as it does to One-Two Man because this story is like a dream. Everything in the whole myth is speaking of the whole man. It is the snake which can come and put an end to the stoneshirtedness of one’s life.
As our story comes to its end, One-Two Man goes off to rescue his mother. So much of this tale revolves around the mother. She carries so much of the feminine. She is, in fact, the reason and inspiration for the whole heroic effort. Simple peoples often have no image of eternal femininity apart from the mother. For us, this image would be carried by a woman of the hero’s own age, the Anima. The mother is the symbol for creativity. When One-Two Man releases his mother from captivity, he releases the creative attitude again. In primitive peoples, or in the primitive part of ourselves, the feminine is much more creative than our general attitude suggests. When One-Two Man releases his mother, creativity is released and of course, there is happiness again in the land.
So, you see what a marvelous evolution is hidden in this naive, tender, beautiful American Indian folk tale.
1. C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Vintage Books Edition by Random House, Inc., New York, 1965.
2. lbid., p. 45.
3. Ibid., p. 68.
4. Ibid., p. 80.
5. Ibid., pp. 87-88.