Evans Lansing Smith

Chair, Mythological Studies

Pacifica Graduate Institute
249 Lambert Road
Carpinteria, CA 93013
esmith@pacifica.edu

The Descent to the Underworld in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller

When Leslie Marmon Silko received the first Larry McMurtry Prize at
Midwestern State University, she was celebrated as a writer working in the tradition of
her great Modernist precursors from the first half of the century. T.S. Eliot’s definition of
the “mythical method” (in his famous review of Joyce’s Ulysses) as a means of giving
“shape and significance” to the “anarchy and futility” of contemporary history identified
the single most important technique of literary Modernism in the 20th century. Indeed, as
my works have shown, there is hardly a major (or minor) figure of the period who, at one
time or another, and in major works, failed to apply the method; and the myth of choice
has invariably been that of the descent to the underworld, which Homer called the
Nekyia. The myth catalyzes certain recurring images of archetypal status, images which I
call necrotypes.1
The reiteration of the descent to the underworld in Storyteller brings several of the
stories and poems in Silko’s volume into fruitful relationship with each other, providing
the unity and coherence that Joyce (in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) called
“consonantia” (the harmonious relationship between the “complex, multiple, divisible,
[and] separable” parts of a work of art), and “integritas” (its unity as “one thing”) upon
the collection as a whole (212). The fusion of consonantia and integritas produces what
Joyce calls “claritas,” which Aquinas defined as “the artistic discovery and
representation of the divine purpose in anything or a force of generalization which would
make the esthetic image a universal one” (213).
The call to adventure that initiates the first Nekyia in Storyteller is a little girl’s
desire to eat her favorite food: a cornmeal mush called “yashtoah” (8). In order to cook
the meal, the mother needs wood to stoke the fire, so she instructs her daughter to “go
down off the mesa / down below / and pick up some pieces of wood” (8). So Waithea
runs “down the precipitous cliff / of Acoma mesa / Down below” there she finds some
pieces of wood (8). The descent motif is made emphatic by the simple repetition of the
word “down,” and by the spectacular situation of the pueblo on top of the famous mesa.
The separation of mother and daughter is also an ancient theme in the long history of the
Nekyia, one which we can trace back to the story of Persephone, whose departure from
her mother begins her descent to the underworld in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. In
Silko’s poem, the connection to the fertility cycle of the grain, so much at the heart of the
Greek version of the myth, is indicated by the corn from which the yashtoah is made:
Waithea is a kind of corn maiden, like Persephone.
When Waithea returns to her mother, she opens her “little wicker basket,” only to
find snakes inside, “instead of the crooked sticks of wood” she had gathered down below
(9). Like the corn, the snake is an archaic symbol of the cycle of death and rebirth
associated with the Nekyia, since it sheds its skin to be reborn. Joseph Campbell has
shown just how pervasive the connection between the snake and feminine was in the
Ancient Mediterranean, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian myth, in which the “Serpent’s
Bride” figures so largely. We know the symbol from Genesis Chapter 2, where, however,
the primordial celebration of the power of the serpent to slough its mortal coil is replaced
by a patriarchal condemnation of both the feminine and her message of new life born
from the old.
In Silko’s story, the appearance of the snake brings death into the world, but also
new images of rebirth, when the little girl—“very much hurt” by her mother’s anger—
goes back down the mesa, determined to drown herself in “Kawaik,” the western lake
beside the “Enchanted Mesa” near the Acoma pueblo (10). An old man tries to
unsuccessfully stop her, and then goes up to warn Waikea’s mother that “Your little
daughter is running away, / she’s going to Kawaik to drown herself” (12). The mother
gathers up all of the little girl’s clothing (“her little manta dress,” and “all her other
garments, / her little buckskin moccasins”), puts them in a “yucca bag,” and sets off as
fast as she can to try to save Waikea. By the time she reaches the lake, however, the little
girl has already “jumped / into the lake” (14). The grief-stricken mother sees only the
little feather Waikea has tied into her hair “whirling / around and around in the depths
below” the surface of the lake (14).
This fascinating passage combines several key necrotypes associated with the
myth of the descent to the underworld—aquatic and ornithological motifs here linked to
the imagery of clothing symbolism. The insertion of the feather into her hair is a kind of
investiture, preparing the girl for her journey into the “depths below” (14). It recalls the
oldest of all Nekyias, the Sumerian “Descent of Inanna,” in which the goddess prepares
for her journey by putting on articles of royal clothing—here simply a feather, an equally
primordial symbol of the soul (one which permeates Egyptian iconography), that takes
flight after death in the form of a bird. The affiliation with the divine feminine and sacred
bodies of water is also a key image in Silko’s cluster of necrotypes: one thinks of the
Lady of the Lake in Arthurian romances of the Middle Ages—a motif, by the way,
recently surfacing in the decision to bury Princess Diana in a mausoleum on an island in
the middle of a lake.
Two final necrotypes come into Silko’s poem at the conclusion of the little girl’s
story, when the mother stands on the “edge / of the high mesa” scattering Waikea’s
clothing “to the east / to the west / to the north and to the south— / in all directions” (15).
When she throws

the “manta dresses and shawls

the moccasins and the yashtoah—
they all turned into butterflies—
all colors of butterflies.
And today they say that acoma has more beautiful butterflies—
Red ones, white ones, blue ones, yellow ones.
They came
From this little girl’s clothing. (15)

The imagery here combines the archetypal motifs of divestiture and the butterfly, a
lepidopteric necrotype that takes us all the way back to Ancient Greece, and especially to
the island of Crete. The word “psyche” in Greek means both soul and butterfly, since the
spirit emerges from the corpse in the same way the chrysalis does from the cocoon. As
Marija Gimbutas has beautifully shown, it is a frequent icon of Minoan iconography, in
which the unfolded wings of the butterfly signified the double-bladed axe carried by the
Lady of the Labyrinth. A particularly poignant example of the connection between the
butterfly and the Nekyia is to be found on a child’s coffin covered with cocoons and
chrysalises.
And so we move from the snake to the butterfly, both of which combine the
opposites of death and rebirth in a single image—which I call hologlyphs. By putting this
marvelous little tale at the beginning of Storyteller, Silko implies that the Nekyia confer
that “shape and significance” upon the entire collection that Eliot associated with “the
mythical method” in Joyce’s Ulysses.
All of these terms, I would argue, apply to Silko’s use of the mythical method in
Storyteller, in which the reiterations and variations of the myth of the Nekyia bring the
separate episodes of the collection into pleasing and significant relationship with each
other. The second iteration of the myth is one of the best known, since the story called
“Yellow Woman” is frequently anthologized. The heroine of this tale is a grown-up
Waikea, married with children . Her journey also begins with a descent, as she walks
along the river below the Laguna Pueblo where Silko grew up. There are “small brown
water birds” hopping in the mud, as the anonymous character simply called “Yellow
Woman” rides her horse in the early morning, following the footprints where she and her
lover, Silva, have come the night before to make love. Yellow Woman sees Silva as a
“ka’tsina spirit,” right out of the tales she had heard her “old grandpa” tell, a story which
the couple proceeds to consciously reenact.
For both seem simultaneously aware of their situation in the present, and the
mythic identities their relationship recreates. The situation recalls Thomas Mann’s
conception of “the lived myth” in his great tetralogy, Joseph and His Brothers. Indeed,
Mann develops his own version of the mythical method in his essay on his tetralogy
called “Freud and the Future,” in which he writes that “the myth is the foundation of life”
(‘Denn Mythus ist Lebensgründung’) (422; 493). He sees myth as the timeless schema,
the pious formula into which life flows” (Essays 422). Words such as “pious formula”
(‘fromme Formel’), “timeless schema” (‘zeitlose Schema’), and “according to pattern”
(‘musterhaft zu benehmen’) (422-23; 493-94) communicate that sense of the pattern
shaping life and art which informs Mann’s notion of the “lived myth” (‘gelebter Mythus’)
(422; 493). Mann explicitly relates the idea to the Nekyia, seeing his Joseph as the
“mangled, buried, and arisen god” (‘das Leben des Zerissenen, Begrabenen und
Auferstehenden’) (426; 498).
And so Yellow Woman and Silva, the ka’tsina spirit from the North, rather
consciously reenact a Pueblo version of the Nekyia. The riverside recalls the importance
of water crossings as thresholds of the underworld, throughout the history of the myth,
from the Epic of Gilgamesh onwards. And, in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the horses
of Hades carry Persephone down into the underworld, upon the occasion of her
abduction. Other necrotypes (in addition the the fluvian and the equestrian) surface as the
journey proceeds: Yellow Woman remembers seeing “the moon in the water” the night
before, when the couple made love—an ancient image of death and rebirth, often
association with the phases of the feminine Nekyia. The oreographic necrotype is added
to the lunar, when the couple rides up into “the foothills,” and further along “the rim of
the mountain plateau” surrounded by “dark lava hills” (56). As they do so, Silva sings “a
mountain song,” which softens Yellow Woman’s resistance to his abduction.
Mountains have been the traditional destination of the Nekyia from
Mesopotamian and Egyptian myth onwards. In the former, Gilgamesh travels through
twelve leagues of darkness in the roots of the mountains, before crossing the waters of
death to meet Utnapishtim; and in an even older myth, the Sumerian goddess Inanna
descends into an underworld called the kur, a word which also means mountain
(Wolkstein and Kramer ). And, in Egyptian myth, the sun sets into the mountains on the
western bank of the Nile, where we see, in the tombs of the Pharoahs, the journey of the
soul depicted on a barge traversing the night sky.
From Silva’s “black house,” made of “black lava rock and red mud,” and set on
top of the mountain plateau to which they have ascended, Yellow Woman can see a
“mountain peak” behind her, and, far below, the entire “world”—the Navajo reservation,
the Pueblos, the ranches of the Texans, and the valleys of the Mexicans. The mountain, in
other words, is an axis mundi, the still point of the turning world, and the place of
revelation, where the fundamental order of the cosmos is disclosed. And the “blue
flowers” that grow in the meadows “behind the stone house” recall the flower Persephone
picks when she is carried off by Hades—a flower D.H. Lawrence beautifully rendered in
his poem about Persephone, “Bavarian Gentians.” Indeed, floral necrotypes permeate
Lawrence’s novels, which are so frequently modeled upon refigurations of the myth of
Persephone’s abduction to the underworld.
But the underworld to which the ka’tsina spirit has taken Yellow Woman is more
than a place of revelation: it is also a place where the mysteries of death are enacted.
There is, after all, something “ancient and dark” about Silva, visible “in his eyes” when
he reaches for the trigger of the rifle in his “saddle scabbard” (61). The ocular necrotype
evoked here is as primordial as it is persistent, going all the way back to Sumerian and
Egyptian myth, and coming up as far as Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49. It is invariably
associated with love and death. At the conclusion of Silko’s tale, four shots are fired; but
we never know who dies. We only know that Yellow Woman’s Nekyia comes full circle,
as she returns to the “place on the river bank” where Silva “had been sitting the first
time” she had seen him, and then on back “the path up from the river into the village,”
where her journey began, and where it ends (62).
Like “Yellow Woman,” the “Buffalo Story” of “COTTONWOOD Part Two,”
also begins with an abduction, when “Kochininako, Yellow Woman,” goes “searching /
for water to carry back to her family (68). The urgent necessities of daily life (food and
water) frequently initiate the Nekyias of Native American myth. In Silko’s narrative
poem, Kochininako comes to a “sharp curve / in an arroyo,” where she finds a pool of
“churning and muddy” water (68). Not knowing “what giant animal had been there”—the
motif being that of Beauty and the Beast—she turns to hurry away, only to encounter
“Buffalo Man,” with “drops of water still shining on his chest” (69). In spite of her
resistance, he grabs her, puts her on his back, and carries her away, going so fast that “she
couldn’t escape him” (69).
Kochininako’s abduction initiates a second Nekyia, when her husband, Arrowboy
waits all night for her return, until “the Big Star / the Morning Star” comes to tell him
that his wife has been taken off to the East by Buffalo Man (70). The astronomical
necrotype evoked in this passage is fundamental to the myth of the descent, originating in
the Sumerian story of Inanna, whose symbol is the planet Venus (Wolkstein and Kramer
187)—which, as Tennyson reminds us in his great elegy, In Memoriam, is both Hesperus
and Vesperus, Morning and Evening star, which follows the sun during its nightly
descent into, and return from the underworld (80). Arrowboy (also called Estoy-eh-muut)
is aided in his search for his abducted wife by Spider Woman, who sits “at the base of a
bee weed plant,” and who gives him “a buckskin pouch / full of red clay dust” to throw in
the faces of the Buffalo People when he rescues his wife. In return, Arrow Boy gives her
“sweet corn pollen,” and then heads east (71).
Insectomorphic necrotypes figure largely in the myth of the descent to the
underworld. Bees and honey are central to Minoan and Greek tradition, beginning with
the “jar of honey” offered to the Lady of the Labyrinth, and moving on to the conceptions
of Demeter as the Queen Bee (Melissa), surrounded by her priestesses (Melissae), and of
the oracular “honey-priestesses, inspired by a honey intoxicant” of the Homeric Hymn to
Hermes (Harrison 442). The dead were said to have fallen into a jar of honey, an allusion
to magical embalming practices of Ancient Greece. Spiders, of course, figure most
largely in the Native American mythologies of the Southwestern United States, the
central conception associated with her eight legs, a mandala of the cosmic web she emits
from her womb. All the Pueblo people have stories about her, and she plays a key role in
the Navajo myth, Where the Two Came to the Father.
When Arrowboy confronts the “buffalo guards” in Silko’s poem, he blinds them
with the dust Spider Woman has given him, and then, “As fast as he could / he found
Kochininako,” who is “sleeping in the tall grass / some distance from the buffalo” (72).
When he awakens her, “She seemed to / get up a little slowly / but he didn’t think much
of it then” (72)—we will soon find out why. The emphasis on the detail of the reluctant
awakening is a marvelous detail, and brings to mind the Gnostic imagery of the soul
trapped in the material world, or imprisoned by a dragon, from which it must be
awakened and liberated. In these myths, the soul is symbolized by the feminine principle
(Sophia, Anima mundi) who has fallen into, become enamoured by, the forces of
darkness, sometimes called Archons, and symbolized in turn by various monsters of the
deep (sea serpents, dragons)—here substituted by the Buffalo people who have stolen
Yellow Woman.2
 She is the soul of the world, imprisoned by the monsters of the material world,
with whom she has fallen in love—asleep and forgetful of the true home which it is the
savior’s job to return her to. Arrowboy has a hard time of it. When he runs away,
Kochininako starts “running slower and slower,” with the Buffalo people in hot pursuit,
until the couple is forced to climb a cottonwood tree for protection. One of the young
buffalo stops under the tree to rest, and Yellow Woman pees on him, thus giving herself
away. The calf looks up and calls out, “Our sister-in-law is here / sitting up in this tree”
(74). She has apparently married Buffalo Man, so that, when Arrowboy kills the entire
herd, she grieves for them, making it clear that she loves him. Enraged, Arrowboy then
kills her too, and makes “buffalo jerky” out her lover and his family (76)!
Like the hero of the Gnostic “Hymn of the Pearl,” and like Joseph in the Bible,
Kochininako has become erotically attached to those forces of darkness with imprison the
soul in the material world. She therefore resists rescue, and return home. Her death,
however, provides her human community with meat that “lasted them a long time,” so
that she becomes the sacrificial victim, whose death nurtures and sustains her people. The
imagery here is richly resonant, drawing as it does from the reservoir of motifs and
themes associated with the Nekyia—death and rebirth, sacrificial murder, sacred
marriage, the beauty and the beast, and homecoming. Although Kochininako does not
return home, Arrowboy’s journey comes full circle, when he is reunited with his people,
bringing them food, and a terrific story about his wife abducted into the world of the
Buffalo people.
The fourth iteration of the Nekyia in Storyteller is a narrative poem I will call
“Kochininako and the Estrucuyu Giant,” since it has no title. Once again, the journey is
compelled by the need for food. Kochininako goes south of the village to hunt rabbits,
when she encounters “a great big animal / called Estrucuyu,” some kind of “giant / they
had back in those days” (83). Attracted to the “four or five big rabbits” handing from her
belt, the monster forces Kochininako to throw them to him, and he gobbles them up, one
by one. Then he asks “‘What else do you have / to give me?’” After Kochininako throws
him her bows, arrows, and flint knife, the Estrucuyu giant asks for her clothes. She steps
into a “rock cave nearby,” got back “as far as she could / in the cave,” and take off her
clothes: buckskin leggings, moccasins, belt, and, finally, her “manta dress” with the
“short cotton smock underneath” (85). After completely stripping down, the monster
starts “poking his giant hand / into the cave,” trying to grab her (86).
The motif here is among the oldest of all, the divestiture necrotype, which
involves the stripping down, and / or disarming of the hero, as he or she makes way into
the underworld. In the Sumerian myth, Inanna sheds seven articles or royal clothing at
each of seven doorways into the underworld, before standing naked in the presence of her
sister Ereshkigal, who kills her with her eye of wrath (Wolkstein and Kramer 55-60). In
the Biblical story, Joseph is stripped down twice during his descent: once when his
brothers throw him into the well, and the second time when Potiphar’s wife snatches off
his robe, and he is sent to the dungeons of the Pharoah. Again, it is a motif I have tracked
all the way up to Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, in which the stripping down
occurs at the beginning, and throughout the course of Oedipa’s Nekyia.3
In Silko’s story, the image takes on distinctly Freudian undertones, with the
Estrucuyu monster forcing his giant hand into Kochininako’s cave, while she strips down
to her cotton smock. It is difficult then not to see the ultimate decapitation of the monster
as a form of castration. This occurs when Kochininako calls out “for the Twin Brothers /
the Hero brothers” to come to her aid. They throw their knifes “at the old Estrucuyu / and
cut off his head” (87). The twins are popular heroes among the various tribes of the
Southwest, most celebrated in the marvelous Navajo version of Where the Two Came to
the Father, gathered by Maud Oakes from the old shaman Jeff King. The legend tells of
their journey to the house of the sun, and subsequent role as monster slayers. Here, after
decapitating Estrucuyu, the twins “split open his stomach,” pull out the heart, and throw
it all the way over to the river “between Laguna and Paguate, right around the corner
from “John Paisano’s place” (87).
Decaptitation and dismemberment are of course standard images of the mythic
journey of the hero into the underworld. Examples of the former would include the story
of John the Baptist, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and such Russian folktales as . In
these myths, the decapitation may be associated with the fertility cycles of the harvest
(the corn is decapitated in the fall, re-capitated in the spring),or with the descent into and
return of the sun from the underworld of the night. The most famous example of the
dismemberment necrotype would surely be the story of Osiris, who is cut up by a gang of
seventy two conspirators led by his brother Set, who scatters the broken pieces of the
body all over Egypt. Osiris is then brought back to life through the agency of his son
Horus, who tracks down all but his father’s penis (which has been swallowed by a fish!),
and his sister bride Isis, who revives him by flapping her wings over his re-membered
corpse, and by making love to the world’s first prosthetic penis (the Bobbit necrotype,
let’s say).
The fifth reiteration of the Nekyia in Silko’s collection I will simply call “Ck’o’yo
Magic,” since it has no title other than “One Time” at the end of the volume (276). This is
a marvelous tale, with a complex variation on the descent to the underworld. It introduces
the theme of witchcraft and magic into the series, when “Old Woman Ck’o’yo’s / son”
comes in from “up north,” and asks the people if they want to learn some new magic:
“‘Yes, we can always use some’” they say! (111). Indeed, the “Twin Brothers” get so
interested in the magic that they neglect their main duty—“caring for the / Mother Corn
altar” (111). When the magician (whose name is Pa’caya’nyi) comes at night with his
mountain lion, with “feathers / on each side of his head,” he conjures first a waterfall
from the north wall, and then a bear from the west. The people then get so busy “playing
around with that / Ck’o’yo magic” that “they neglected the Mother Corn altar” (113).
This is the crisis that initiates the Nekyia. And it recalls the myth of Demeter
(Mother Corn for the Greeks), whose grief over the loss of her daughter Persephone to
Hades, Lord of the Underworld, leads to her withdrawal of the fruits of the earth. In
Silko’s story, Corn Mother takes “the plants and grass” from her wayward children, and
stirs up the dust, so that “The people were starving” (115).
A helper appears in the form of the Hummingbird, who is “fat and shiny” because
he seems to have “plenty to eat” (115). He tells the people that Corn Mother has gone
“Down below / Three worlds below this one,” where “everything is / green” (115)—a
reference to the widespread emergence myth of the American Southwest, according to
which life emigrated upwards through a series of underworlds, before reaching the
surface of the earth, where the first human couple was created from two ears of corn.
Corn Mother has gone back down to her domain—one thinks here of Goethe’s marvelous
Queens of the Underworld in Faust, in which the goddesses are said to be “enthroned in
loneliness” (My trans.).
 Hummingbird serves as a psychopompos, or guide of souls to the underworld,
instructing the starving people that they will need a messenger to go to Corn Mother,
hiding out three worlds down below. She tells them to “Bring a beautiful pottery jar /
painted with parrots and big flowers,” to mix “black mountain dirt / some sweet corn
flour / and a little water,” and to sing a song “softly / above the jar” (116). On the fourth
day a “big green fly / with yellow feelers on his head / flew out of the jar,” and then flies
“to the fourth world / below” with Hummingbird (117).
The imagery here seems most certainly to have been imported into the Pueblo
world from Mesoamerica, in which Huitzilopochtli, the Hummingbird of the South,
represents the “tribal war and sun god of the Aztecs” (Willis 242). He appears to the
Aztecs as an eagle perched on a cactus, “when they found themselves, after a 200-year
journey, lacking all faith or purpose on a swampy island in Lake Texcoco” (Willis 242).
Like the Hummingbird, who guides the starving Pueblo people to the worlds below, the
jar with the parrots seems also to suggest a Mesoamerican influence, most likely moving
northwards along the lines of trade that converge on Chaco Canyon, to the north east of
the Laguna Pueblo where Silko grew up.4
In her marvelous little fable, Hummingbird and the big green fly find Corn
Mother, three underworlds down, and give her an offering of “blue pollen and yellow
pollen,” plus some “turquoise beads” and “prayer sticks” (118). She in turn tells them that
in order to restore fertility to the waste land, they must “get old Buzzard to purify” the
town, and then she will send “food and rain again” (118). But when they go to old
Buzzard, he demands that they get him some “Tobacco,” so that they must fly “all the
way back down” to ask Corn Mother where to get some. She in turn tells them to “Go ask
caterpillar,” who lives in the West. Caterpillar lives “downstairs” too, and responds to
their request by spreading out “dry cornhusks on the floor,” rubbing his hands together,
and folding tobacco into the husks. When old Buzzard gets his tobacco, he flies east,
west, north, and south, thus purifying the town, so that “The storm clouds returned / the
grass and plants started to grow again. / There was food / and the people were happy
again” (121).
The regeneration of the waste land, facilitated by the descent to and return from
the underworld, is of course a central motif of literary Modernism (c.f. Eliot’s The Waste
Land), here beautifully adapted to the Pueblo traditions Silko so beautifully draws from
throughout her book. In the story of the Ck’o’yo’ magician, the myth is clearly connected
to the fertility cycle of the crops, just as it is in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which
formed the basis of the rituals of the Eleusinian mysteries, central to Greek religion for
nearly 2000 years, before the Emperor Theodosius put a stop to them with his famous
edict. So too did the political authority of the United States government proceed, when it
banned the sun dance in the 19th century, and later in the 20th forced children like Leslie
Silko to leave their home and attend “Indian” schools, in an effort to break the spine of
their traditional cultures.
As a result, Silko’s work has a strong political component, as exemplified by the
next tale in the volume, “Tony’s Story,” which I call a social Nekyia. The waste land
conditions that initiate the journey in the short story are both natural and historical: it’s
hot, the summer rains don’t come, “the sheep were thin, and the tumbleweed turned
brown and died” (123). The ancient symbolism of the cycle of the seasons is here evoked
by the Ferris Wheel, where Tony sees his friend Leon standing, on the day before the
Corn Dance (123-24). During the festival, the image of San Lorenzo will be carried “back
to his niche in the church” (124). The occasion thus combines Native American and
Catholic mythologies, in a manner wholly typical of the Southwestern pueblos and
villages. And, as in the previous stories, the fertility cycle of the corn serves as a
mythological background to the Nekyia that unfolds in the story.
The journey begins this time when a state cop beats Leon up at the fair, for no
apparent reason, and then loads him up “in the back of the paddy wagon” to take him off
to Albuquerque. Tony goes after him, arriving at the hospital where Leon has been
stitched up, when the “moon was already high” (124)—an image which brings the night-
sea and lunar necrotypes into the story, both of which are associated with the symbolism
of death, rebirth, and sacrifice. When Tony returns from Albuquerque, “the moon had
moved lower into the west, and left the close rows of houses in long shadows” (125). The
journey then triggers a dream in which Tony sees the “big cop pointing a long bone” at
him, like the ones witches use. Its “whiteness flashed silver in the moonlight,” and the
cop has no “human face—only little, round, white-rimmed eyes on a black ceremonial
mask” (125).
 In all variations on the myth of the descent, the archetypal energies of the
imagination are catalyzed, in the form of dream visions—a kind of oneiric Nekyia, like
Tony’s, in which the symbolism of the underworld surfaces boils up from the
unconscious. Here the witches, the bone, and the white eyes on the black mask
powerfully evoke the demonic energies of the dead—here mixed with the anarchy and
futility of contemporary history. For, in the second journey of the story, when Tony and
Leon leave the pueblo to drive onto the state highway, they are once again pursued by the
sadistic cop. The drought conditions have persisted, and the heat shimmers “above wilted
fields of corn” (125)—the waste land again is natural and political. When Tony looks
back at the squad car with the red light whirling around, he sees only “the dark image of a
man, but where the face should have been there were only the silvery lenses of the dark
glasses he wore” (125)—as sinister a figure of death as one can imagine.
The emphasis on the eyes is intriguing: as the cop studies “Leon’s driver’s
license,” Tony avoids his face, knowing that he “couldn’t look at his eyes,” and
remembering when he was little and his parents warned him “not to look into the masked
dancers’ eyes because they would grab me, and my eyes would not stop” (126). The
ocular necrotype evoked in this passage takes us all the way back to the mythologies of
the Ancient Near East: to the Sumerian, in which Inanna is killed in the underworld by
her sister Ereshkigal’s “eye of death” (Wolkstein and Kramer 60); and the Egyptian, in
which the Eye of Horus figures largely in the iconography of the death and resurrection
of Osiris (Clark 218f.; Wilkinson 42-43). In a perfectly marvelous study of myth and
folklore, Lawrence di Stasi tracks the ocular motif of the Evil eye, from Ancient Malta to
modern Sardinia.
In the third and final journey in the story—which is given shape and significance
by three reiterations of the Nekyia—Leon and Tony drive from their pueblo up to the
sheep camp in the “sandstone mesas” off the main highway, where “suddenly all the trees
are piñons” (128). Leon sees the cop when he glances “in the rearview mirror” (128)—a
fine detail which brings the specular necrotype into the narrative, for mirrors and the
underworld go hand in hand, as for example (among many others) in Cocteau’s great
film, Orphée.5 It is combined with the ocular motifs, when the patrol car pulls up beside
Leon’s, and Tony sees “the reflections” that keep moving “across the mirror lenses of the
dark glasses” the cop is wearing.
All Nekyias move towards a sacred space—which the Greeks called a temenos—
where the mysteries of death and rebirth are enacted. In “Tony’s Story,” the temenos is
way up at the end of a narrow canyon with pale sandstone close on either side—the
canyon that ended with a spring where willows and grass and tiny blue flowers grow”
(128). In this lovely place, Tony murders the cop, shooting him when he attacks Leon
with his night stick, raised high “like the long bone” in Tony’s “dream when he pointed it
at me—a human bone painted brown to look like wood” (128). After the cop collapses,
“the bone wand lay near his feet,” and (Tony tells us) his “dark glasses hadn’t fallen off
and they blinded me with their hot-sun reflections” (129). The murder is ritualistic, for it
releases the waters withheld by the cops witchery: at the end of the story while the cop is
incinerated in his car, rain clouds gather in the west, promising an end to the drought, and
a regeneration of the waste land (129).
The theme of sorcery comes front and center in the next Nekyia, the seventh out
of the ten that comprise the volume as a whole. I will call it “The Witches Conference”
(130f.). It recalls such standard variations on the theme as Shakespeare’s weird sisters of
the heath in Macbeth, Goethe’s Walpurgisnacht on the Brocken in Faust, and
Hawthornes’ Witches’ Sabbath in “Young Goodman Brown.” All involve a journey
(whether into the forest or out onto the heath), and the climactic encounter with what
Silko calls “dark thing” (130). In her narrative poem, all the “witch people” get together
“for a contest” (130). They come “from all directions / witches from all the Pueblos / and
all the tribes,” including the Navajo, the Hopi, and the Zuni (131). The gathering takes
place “Way up in the lava rock hills / north of Cañoncito,” where the witches get together
“to fool around in caves” (131).
The geological imagery here is archetypally associated with the Nekyia, in which
both mountains and caves figure largely—the oreographic and speluncular necrotypes of
the tradition, going all the way back to the Epics of Gilgamesh and Odysseus, and
coming up to us through Virgil and Dante. Cañoncito is home territory for Silko, between
Albuquerque and Mt. Taylor. Here in the caves the witches put on their animal skins
(“Fox, badger, bobcat, and wolf”), after circling the fire four times. The image recalls
both Goethe’s Walpurgisnacht (Faust 1: l.3835f.), and, farther back, the Maenads who
worship Dionysus in the mountains outside the city in The Bacchae of Euripides. And
what would a witches’ Sabbath be without a pot, like the one we see in productions of
Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1.3.1-79), or the “Devil’s Cook” (‘Teufelskochin’) stirring in the
Hieronymus Bosch’s “Gluttony” panel.
Silko’s witches have “big cooking pots” for “Whorls of skin / cut from fingertips /
sliced from the penis end and clitoris tip,” plus a disgusting array of other ingredients:

Dead babies simmering in blood

Circles of skull cut away
All the brains sucked out.
Witch medicine
To dry and grind into powder
For new victims. (132)

An infernal brew indeed! The contest, however, is one by an androgynous witch who
stands “in the shadows beyond the fire / and no one ever knew where this witch came
from / which tribe / or if it was a woman or a man” (132). She wins the contest with out
“charms or powers,” but with an apocalyptic “story” (132). As in Shakespeare, this witch
has the power to “look into the seeds of time / And say which grain will grow and which
will not” (Macbeth, 1.3.58-59). “[A]s I tell the story,” she warns, “it will begin to
happen. // Set in motion now / set in motion by our witchery / to work for us” (133). Her
story is of the coming of the European white men, and of their destruction of the Indian
tribes, and ultimately of each other, when they find uranium ore “in these hills [….] rocks
with veins of green and yellow and black. / They will lay the final pattern with these rocks
/ they will lay it across the world / and explode everything” (136). When the tale is done,
Silko concludes, no one can “Call that story back” (137).
This fusion of the two myths of the Nekyia and the apocalypse is central to the
Modernist tradition, from D.H. Lawrence’s last book Apocalypse, to T.S. Eliot’s Four
Quartets, H.D.’s Trilogy, Hermann Broch’s Death of Virgil, James Joyce’s Finnegans
Wake, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, and Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus. It is a
fusion of myths that will predominate throughout Silko’s big book, Almanac of the Dead,
based on the Mesoamerican and Hopi prophecies of the stone calendars. Taken together,
the two myths represent what we might call the historical Nekyia, in which the descent to
the underworld provides the lens through which to perceive the shape and significance
lying beneath the anarchy and futility of contemporary events.
The eighth Nekyia in Silko’s series also involves sorcery and witchraft (obsessive
themes throughout the course of her career). The journey begins with a domestic crisis
(as so many of our journeys do), when “Estoy-eh-mut, Arrowboy,” begins to feel that
“something was not as it should be. / Something felt out of place / but he didn’t know
what it was” (140). The domestic crisis converges with the collective conditions of the
waste land: there is a drought, a dry spring, sickly corn plants, and beans devoured by
worms (140-41). Arrowboy feels “dizzy and weak” while working in the fields, and his
sister asks “who had been sick at his house / the night before,” when she saw someone
going out the door of his house (140).
These conditions initiate Arrowboy’s Nekyia, when he gets up the next morning
to go “see / old Spider Woman,” who he finds sitting “under a snakeweed plant” (141).
The threshold imagery central to the myth of the Nekyia emerges here when Arrowboy
wonders how he can get in Spider Woman’s house, which is “so small” (142). She tells
him to put his “foot in the door,” and, “when he did / he was able to enter / the spider
hole” (142). Spider Woman knows what’s up—why he feels something is right, why it
seems to be getting worse all the time, why he is filled with anxiety that leaves him
shaking all day—as a good therapist should. She gives him a “special powder” to
swallow that will keep him awake, so he can pretend to sleep when his wife gets up in the
middle of the night, and then to follow her when she goes out. The powder is an antidote
to the “ear of dark purple corn” Kochininako puts beside Arrowboy at night “to make
him sleep” (144).
And so the nekyia begins: Arrowboy follows Kochininako at midnight, when she
goes north “to a place in the hills / where there are many caves / in the sandstone cliffs”
(144). We are in the mountain caves again, this time in a “large shallow cave” where the
“Kunideeyah Clan” meets. They are known as “the Destroyers,” and, like the witches of
the previous tale, they take on a variety of animal forms (145). When they sense that “an
outsider is spying on us,” Kochininako is ordered to use a magic “broom straw” to take
Arrowboy away from the cave, where he has been “creeping around” (146). She takes
puts him asleep, and deposits him on the “narrow edge” of a “dangerous and precipitous
cliff,” from which there is “no escape” (147). While he is trapped there, the Kunideyahs
“perform their night work / uttering weird cries / of wolves, mountain lions, coyotes, and
bears,” and sneaking off to “cause madness” in one house, dragging a night traveler away
from another, stampeding deer so the village people would go hungry in another,
strangling a sleeping baby in another—and then feasting at midnight “on the heart of the
slain traveler /and on the infant’s brain” (148). When they finish feasting, they fall upon
each other in a sexual orgy, “men embracing other men / women reaching for the
rattlesnake, / the whip snake Kunideeyahs / they desired,” before at last returning “to
their homes / before dawn” (148-49)—thus completing the cycle of their noctural
Nekyia.6
Arrowboy seems also one of the victims of this infernal frenzy. But “two little
ground squirrels” hear him cyring like “a dead person,” and set about to rescue him from
his perilous perch. “When Old Mother Ground Squirrel” comes home, they tell her “they
heard a dead person / crying on the high cliff” (150), reinforcing the connection between
Arrowboy’s journey and the language of the Nekyia. They rather charmingly plant “four
piñon seeds” at the base of the cliff, which grow quickly into tall trees / reaching the
ledge just where Estoy-eh-mut lay,” and then bring him water carried “in little acorn shell
cups / up the piñon trees / to the ledge” (151). Arrowboy reciprocates when he regains his
strength, climbs down the tree, and brings the squirrel family “many rabbits and deer,”
before starting his own trip homeward (151)—it has indeed been a long day’s journey
into night.7
On the return journey—a variation on the nostoi of Greek epic—Arrowboy find
his Grandmother, “old Spider Woman / calling from her place / under a yucca” (152). He
tells her that “Kochininako belongs to the Kunideeyah Clan,” and that he must hurry
home “to warn the people about her” (152). Spider Woman keeps him with her for four
days, then gives him a “coiled ring / called a maas-guuts / used to cushion the water jars /
the people carried / balanced on their heads” (153). It is woven from yucca fiber in an
“unusual design,” “the figure of a snake” (153). On the way home, when he sees his wife
Kochininako come out from the village to greet him, Arrowboy rolls the coil down the
hill; it hits her in the chest, turns into a rattlesnake, and kills her—thus defeating the
forces of death and sorcery, the task of all great masters of the heroic descent to the
underworld (such as Jesus, Lancelot, Orpheus, Theseus).
 Works Cited

Budge, E.A. Wallis. The Gods of the Egyptians, or Studies in Egyptian Mythology.
Vol.1. (1904). New York: Dover Publications, 1969.

Campbell, Joseph. Historical Atlas of World Mythology. 2 Vols. New York: Harper and
Row, 1988.

---, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology. New York: Viking Press, 1964.

Clark, R.T. Rundle. Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt. London: Thames and Hudson,
1959.

Eliot, T.S. “Ulysses, Order and Myth.” 1923. The Modern Tradition. Ed. Richard
Ellmann and Charles Feidelson. New York: Oxford UP, 1965.

Euripides, The Bacchae. Trans. William Arrowsmith. The Complete Greek Tragedies:
Euripides III. Ed. David Grene and Richard Lattimore. New York: The Modern
Library, 1959.

Gimbutas, Marija. The Language of the Goddess. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989.

Goethe’s Faust. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Doubleday & Company
Inc., 1963.

Harrison, Jane. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. (1903). London: Merlin
Press, 1962.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Young Goodman Brown.” Tales and Sketches. New York: The
Library of America, 1982.

Jonas, Hans. The Gnostic Religion. Second Edition. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. New York: Viking Press, 1967.

---, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ed. Chester Anderson. New York: Viking,
1968.

Mann, Thomas. “Death in Venice.” Stories of Three Decades. Trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936.

Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a
Friend. Trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948.

---, ---, “Freud and the Future.” Essays of Three Decades. Trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976.

---, “Freud und die Zukunft.” Reden und Aufsätze. Gesammelte Werke. 12 Vols.
Oldenburg: S. Fischer Verlag, 1960. Vol 9.

---, Joseph and His Brothers. Trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1976.

---, The Magic Mountain. Trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966.

Matthews, Washington. The Mountain Chant: A Navajo Ceremony. Foreword by Paul

Zolbrod. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 1997.

Quispel, Gilles. “Der Gnostische Anthropos und Die Jüdische Tradition.” Eranos-
Jahrbuch (1953): Mensch und Erde. Vol. XXII. Ed. Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn. Zürich:
Rhein Verlag, 1954.

Shakespeare, Macbeth. The Complete Shakespeare. Ed.Alfred Harbage. Baltimore:

Penguin Books,1969.

Smith, Evans Lansing. “Alchemy and Modernism.” Cauda Pavonis: Studies in

Hermeticism. New Series 13.1 (Spring 1994): 11-18.

---, “Amazing Underworlds: Yourcenar’s Fires and Nabokov’s Pale Fire. The Yearbook
of Comparative and General Literature, Vol. 45/46 (1997/1998): 105-31.
---, “Apocalypse and Modernism.” Paper. Special Session. MLA: December, 1992.

---, “The Arthurian Underworld of Modernism: Thomas Mann, Thomas Pynchon,

Robertson Davies.” Arthurian Interpretations. Spring, 1990. 4 (2): 50-64.

---, “The Descent to the Underworld in Borges and Cortázar.” The Yearbook of
Comparative and General Literature. 40 (1992): 105-115.

---, “The Descent to the Underworld: Jung and His Brothers” C.G. Jung and the
Humanities: Towards a Hermeneutics of Culture. Ed. Karin Barnaby and Pellegrino
D’Acierno. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990.

---, “Doorways, Divestiture, and the Eye of Wrath: Tracking an Archetype,” Janus Head:
Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy,
Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts, 2.1 (Summer 1999): 11-28.

---, Figuring Poesis: A Mythical Geometry of Postmodernism. New York: Peter Lang,
1997.

---, “Framing the Underworld: Threshold Imagery in the Films of Murnau, Cocteau, and
Bergman.” Literature / Film Quarterly. 24.3 (1996): 241-54.

---, “The Golem and the Garland of Letters in Borges and Broch.” Journal of the
Fantastic in the Arts. Special Issue: The Golem. 7 (2-3): 177-90.

---, The Hero Journey in Literature: Parables of Poesis. Lanham: University Press of
America, 1997.

---, “The Lyrical Nekyia: Metaphors of Poesis in Wallace Stevens,” The Journal of
Modern Literature XXI, 2 (Winter 1997-98): 201-08.

---, “Myths of Poesis, Hermeneusis, and Psychogenesis: Hoffmann, Tagore, and Gilman.”
Studies in Short Fiction 34 (1997): 227-36.
---, “Postmodernist Revisionings of the Grail: Leonora Carrington, Umberto Eco,
Thomas Pynchon.” Mythosphere: A Journal of Image, Myth, and Symbol. 1.4
(1999): 507-22.

---, Rape and Revelation: The Descent to the Underworld in Modernism. Lanham:
University Press of America, 1990.

---, Ricorso and Revelation: An Archetypal Poetics of Modernism. Columbia, SC:

Camden House, 1995.

---, “Re-Figuring Revelation: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.” The American
Transcendental Quarterly. June, 1990. 4 (2): 91-104.

Stasi, Lawrence di. Mal Occhio {Evil-Eye}: The Underside of Vision. San Francisco:
North Point Press, 1981.

Walker, Barbara. The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. New York: Harper
and Row, 1983.

Wilkinson, Richard H. Reading Egyptian Art: A Hieroglyphic Guide to Ancient Egyptian

Painting and Sculpture. London: Thames and Hudson, 1992.

Willis, Roy, ed.. World Mythology. Foreword by Robert Walter. New York: Henry Holt
and Company, 1993.

Wolkstein, Diane and Samuel Noah Kramer. Innana: Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her
Stories and Hymns from Sumer. New York: Harper and Row, 1983.

1
See my books and articles listed in the Works Cited.
2
See Hans Jonas and Gilles Quispell on the Gnostic myths.
3
See my article in Janus Head, or the introduction to The Descent to the Underworld in Postmodern
Literature, for a comprehensive overview of the motif.
4
See Joseph Campbell’s magisterial Historical Atlas of World Mythology for key maps of the “Ancient
Roadways in the North American Southwest” ().
5
On mirror imagery and the Nekyia, see my Descent to the Underworld in Postmodern Literature (17-19),
and Chapter One of Figuring Poesis.
6
One thinks here also of Mann’s witches: of the Maenads in “Death in Venice,” who devour baby animals
and engage in orgiastic copulation in the mountains; of the climactic dream of The Magic Mountain, in
which the witches dismember and devour a child (494); and in Joseph in Egypt, where the “slobbering”
witches gnaw on “carrion bones” (814).
7
The escape of the hero, perched perilously on the ledge of a cliff, reminds one of the Navajo night chant,
as recorded by Washington Matthews, as does the intervention of various small game and insects.