“Never tell!”
These words, that seal truth in silence, set the mythic secret on its path. How the secret meets its inevitable demise determines the quality of its solemn, responsible life.

Mongolian myth tells of Hailibu, a kindly hunter who one day saved the life of a small white snake just as a crane was about to gobble her up. The snake revealed that she was the daughter of the Dragon King and, in gratitude, took her rescuer to meet her father that he might be rewarded. Acting on the advice of the little snake, Hailibu respectfully turned down the dragon’s offers of treasure and asked for one thing only: the stone in the Dragon King’s mouth that would enable him to understand the language of the birds and animals. As he was departing with this gift, the little snake told Hailibu that he must never reveal the source of the knowledge he would now be privy to, or he would turn to stone. “Never forget this!” she warned.

Of course we know that telling is exactly what Hailibu will do.

Although a secret is often imparted as a gift and may be received as one, before long its true nature becomes crushingly apparent. A secret is also a burden. The knowledge that must never be told has a strange property. It does not remain its original size. The silence in which it is packed makes it grow. It balloons, it mushrooms, it feeds on the bearer and takes advantage of his determination to suppress it. A secret passed down from a god or goddess, a ruler or member of the spirit world is an especially onerous responsibility, for besides containing all the weight and density of an ordinary mortal’s secret, it often entails information that can change the lives of an entire community, even the entire world.

Once Hailibu could understand the voices of the animals, he learned firsthand where to find the herds, so he could hunt with accuracy and feed his people well. One day, however, he overheard a flock of birds discussing a terrible event that was about to occur. Mountains were going to erupt, they warbled, and a great flood would cover the land. Even as he felt destiny close in on him, Hailibu hurried to inform the people and urge them to flee. They didn’t believe him, of course. They wanted to know how he came by such preposterous news. Now the secret tormented him. Should he betray the gift or let his people die?

Never tell!

He did what he had to do, what the story demands that he do: he told. And even as he was revealing the gift of the snakes, he was turning to stone.1

Never tell! It was what Aphrodite warned the handsome Greek, Anchises, after she seduced him. He must have had just that intention, at least at first. When the goddess appeared to him, after all, he was so awestruck that he feared for his very life. But after a while the sacred and extraordinary began to seem commonplace to him, and one day, quite casually, he boasted to a friend that sleeping with a goddess was not much different from sleeping with a mortal woman. Aphrodite crippled him for his indiscretion.

Never tell! Even today, when the word myth has come to mean widely believed lie, we all recognize intuitively the power of the secret. In the plots of supermarket romance novels and world literature, in opera and soap opera, film and comic books, the bestowal of a great secret is an act loaded with such grave implications that it grips us hearers, us witnesses-in-the-know, with almost as much tension and sense of painful inevitability as it will eventually cause the one who receives it in the story. The secret must be protected like a holy icon, wrapped in a shroud of respect and laid in a reliquary of silence. It must be kept for the sake of the recipient—and cannot be kept for the sake of the story. This we understand; it is why we always flinch and, at the same time, wholeheartedly acquiesce when, after a long life in silence, the secret is about to be revealed.

The mythic secret is actually transmitted twice: first from the originator to the secret-holder, next from the secret holder to the world at large. Between these two events, the keeper of the secret is potent with that particular seed pod of knowledge. He is the channel between potential and actual, breath and body, non-being and being, the idea and the manifestation of the idea. The secret bearer is both fertile with wisdom and sterile with the inability to use it. She can do everything and may do nothing.

Goethe cautioned: “Tell no one, only the very wise.”2 Yet often it is an exceptionally innocent and generous person who receives the great secret from on high and simply hasn’t the guile to maintain the duplicity that bearing it demands. Hailibu, for example, first saved a small snake and finally saved his own people, and in the middle used his secret to feed the community. Another who could not endure the painful swelling of the secret he received was the young barber in a Celtic myth that has its counterpart in a nearly identical tale about King Minos of Crete. It seems that a king, Lora Lonschach, nursed a private embarrassment: he had the ears of a horse. Every time he got a haircut, he ordered the barber be put to death immediately afterward, so the man would not tell anyone what he’d had to wield his shears around. Apparently not a person without feeling, however, the king consented to spare the life of one young barber, after the boy’s mother begged him to do so. The only condition: absolute silence.

The boy agreed, but inevitably the weight of what he knew became too heavy. Possibly it was the secret itself that festered in him, the need to keep it, rather than the sight of those royal ears. At any rate, he consulted a wise Druid, who recommended that he tell his secret to a tree, which would lighten the load while still maintaining, in the strictest sense, silence. The young man unburdened himself to a willow and indeed felt much better afterward. Soon, however, a famous bard, needing some wood to repair his harp, cut and used a branch of that same tree. The very next time he began to play, the first words that spooled, unbidden, from his mouth were, “And the ears of a horse has Lora Lonschach!”

Somehow the secret must breach the silence that surrounds it. That is its destiny. Yet how this happens is crucially important. It must be done with integrity. There must be a very good reason for drawing the secret forth and exposing it: lives must be at stake or the well-being of a country. Simply letting the secret slip out as gossip would be a betrayal both of the original trust and of the sanctity of the secret itself. When some rude, coarse revelation happens in the stories, we don’t mind at all when the teller gets punished. We do not feel pity as we do for kindly Hailibu. Discussing the mystery of the Holy Grail and of the vessel that inspired the legend, Jesse Weston—whose classic book on the subject influenced T. S. Eliot’s creation of The Waste Land—wrote, “If spoken of at all it must be with scrupulous accuracy.”3 Anchises was one secret bearer who failed to speak with scruples. He blabbed about an afternoon of passion with the goddess of love as if he were comparing wines. That she merely crippled him seems mild retribution, especially in a pantheon where gods routinely turned people into echoes, bats, or cows for less egregious errors of judgment.

Not only the telling, but even the hearing of a great secret must be an honorable act, free of guile or ulterior motives. That is the lesson we draw from similar tales from two very different traditions—Mohawk and Russian.4 In both these stories, a good-hearted but gullible young man takes the advice of a mean spirited relative (Mohawk: uncle/ Russian: brother) and climbs into the branches of a certain tree to spend the night. A commotion on the ground below shatters the darkness, and the young man overhears a party of evil beings (Mohawk: spirits/Russian: witches) boast about how they have made an important figure in the culture (chief/princess) ill and gloat how simple the cure would be if only it were known (moss from the cedar the young man crouches in/water from a nearby spring). In the morning, as soon as the bad ones depart, the young man rushes back to the community, delivers the message, and is rewarded when the person is instantly cured. When the devious relative, who had hoped to get rid of the boy by sending him to the tree in the first place, hurries there in hopes of grabbing some useful information for himself, he is spied by the evil-doers and destroyed.

We understand this, we moderns who carry in our genes more of the architecture of the ancient myths than we think we do. We recognize the tacit decorum that must be respected in the universe of the secret, and we accede to it on a deep level that is both personal and cultural. Not just in fiction, but in world affairs as well, we condemn someone who reveals secret information in order to discredit a decent person or protect an unscrupulous one (Scooter Libby telling reporters that Valerie Plame worked undercover for the CIA), while we praise the teller who leaks information to expose the selfish and immoral for who they really are (Karen Silkwood and other whistle-blowers, Woodward and Bernstein). The secret, revealed, can be weapon or medicine. Often, our own ethical values determine how we hear and whether we speak.

The secret has a relationship with silence. Together they are like prospective lovers who have not yet admitted the enormity of their attraction to each other and so can act only on the simultaneous fascination and distrust that torments them, pulling on them with unruly desire. The secret is proud of its independence, yet longs for some excuse to ravish the silence. Silence presses ever closer and more invasively against the secret, pretending that is merely its nature, even while daring the secret to reach out and caress it. Each pretends to ignore what it is constantly, achingly aware of: the presence of the other. Both hope and fear that eventually they will come together, and they know that if that happens they will create something that has never existed before. No longer will they be secret and silent. Their old forms will cease to exist and something else will spring forth in their places.

This is the life story of the secret, and silence aids and abets the process. Even those original tellers of the secret, who warn that something terrible will happen if it is uttered, even they know this. Lora Lonschach, for instance, when news of his deformity rang out through the agency of a harp, did not kill the young barber, or the bard, nor did he have the harp destroyed. Surpassing the expectations of all, he greeted the revelation withequanimity. Having lost the need to hide his shame, he was apparently able to relax at last, and he killed no barbers from that time forth. The giant earth-shaman, Antero Vipunen, in the incantatory Finnish epic, Kalevala, responded in much the same way after the epic’s hero, bossy, crotchety, cunning Väinämöinen, stole into his belly and forced him to sing the magical words of creation by threatening to cook and eat the shaman, “the old word-hoarder,” from the inside out. We can almost hear Antero Vipunen’s deep belly laugh after he finally concedes and sings his magic words and then opens his mouth to let his adversary free. He confesses he’s never before swallowed the likes of old Väinämöinen and adds: “You did well to come/you’ll do better to return.”5

Holy icon, seed pod of knowledge, beloved of silence, enlightener only after it exists no more: what a life story has the secret! Perhaps one reason we understand this story so well is because we know that we, too, bear the responsibility of guiding previously unknown and unimagined wisdom into the world. Uttering words we’ve been told to keep under wraps may be nothing more than an act of rebellious spite. But at the best of times it is the radical act that frees life-changing energy contained in those words.

Are we ready, then? What secrets do we hold whose time has come? Are there secrets that we keep on keeping for someone (or some institution), even though we know, like the boys in the trees, that silence does nobody but the perpetrator any good? What secrets of our own, what shameful horse ears do we protect? Some unalterable part of who we are? Or something that the telling itself might help to modify: an addiction, a suspicion, an indiscretion? Is there some truth we need to tell a friend or loved one, as silent avoidance poisons the relationship? Who or what is demanding Never tell? Do we keep a secret that no one has asked us to keep, simply because we’re afraid of being judged? Even the great Lakota medicine man, Black Elk, fell into this trap when he was a boy, after he received a great vision from Spirit, but unexpectedly and without having first been guided to a sacred fasting place. “Nephew!” an old medicine man said firmly to him after his long self-imposed silence had made the boy ill. “You must do your duty and perform this vision for your people upon the earth…. Then the fear will leave you; but if you do not do this, something very bad will happen to you.”6 Kept secreted within, the budding self has no air and light to grow; once the vision (or opinion or conviction) is liberated, it can flower with and for others. Finally, is someone keeping a secret about us—and if so, is it something we would wish to hide or is it, perhaps, something that could harm us only if used without scruples: who our friends are, what policies we protest, what organizations we support?

Before the secret is exposed, the world is not even aware of its absence. We live in ignorance. The bearer of the secret seems like an ordinary person to us, with ordinary, inconsequential preoccupations. With the articulation of the secret, he suddenly stands out in his landscape, strange and separate, like the stone monument that the people of Hailibu’s village are said to have carved in honor of him when they returned home after surviving the cataclysm. Gods create the world with words and breath that they unleash in their yearning for company in the void. The secret, once it has been spoken, unleashes another kind of world: it illuminates what was once in shadow and forces those of us who hear it out of our previous ignorance. It gives us information about the beginning of the world or the end of it, about the vulnerability of a king or a village chief, or even about the obsessive desires of a goddess. With such knowledge in our consciousness, we must grow up a little bit more. We must acknowledge that the mighty ones are more like us than we thought, or we are more like them. In so doing, we become more fully human.

Never tell!

Until your very life depends on telling.

1 “Hailibu the Hunter,” Family of Earth & Sky, ed. John Elder and Hertha D. Wong (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 75–77.
2 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Holy Yearning,” trans. Trebbe Johnson with Anneliese Heurich, The World Is a Waiting Lover: Desire and the Quest for the Beloved (New World Library, 2005), 266.
3 Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1997), 130.
4 “The Tree of Evil Spirits,” Parabola (Vol. 24, No. 4, Winter 1999), 21–24. “The Cedar Tree,” Parabola (Vol. XI, No. 1, Spring 1986), 81–82.
5 Kalevala, trans. Keith Bosley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 213–15.
6 John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), 165.