SOURCE: McMaster, Juliet. “The Trinity Archetype in The Jungle Books and The Wizard of Oz.” Children's Literature 20 (1992): 90-110.

[In the following essay, McMaster establishes parallels between the adaptation of the Christian Trinity archetype in Kipling's The Jungle Books and L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.]

The magical and mystical significance of the number three is common to myth, religion, and children's literature. But though the cluster of three is important, it is also expected that the units within the cluster be subtly differentiated, and in some sense opposed and complementary. The most familiar constellation of this grouping and opposition is of course the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, the three in one. But the Trinity of Western culture is only one example of many such groupings in which the three elements are joined and opposed in a structure that is psychologically, morally, and artistically satisfying. Not surprisingly, the pattern occurs, with a parallel assignment of qualities to the three units, in a number of books written for children. My own concern is with the pattern as it is adapted in two works not far separated in time, but in space and culture further apart than two continents: Rudyard Kipling's two Jungle Books and L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In each we find a trinity of companions for the protagonist, and in each the companions are differentiated and specialized in recognizably parallel ways.

The three persons of the Trinity, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, though indivisibly one, each specialize. God the Father, the Yahweh of the Old Testament, is creator and lawgiver, strong in justice and discipline. God the Son, the Christ of the New Testament, is the redeemer, saving man out of love and through sacrifice. God the Holy Spirit, always a more mysterious entity, seldom appears as a character, but is familiar in iconography as the bird that mediates between God and the Virgin in depictions of the Annunciation, and is invoked by Milton as the being who “Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss” (I. 21). The particular qualities assigned to these familiar dramatis personae are, respectively, omnipotence, benevolence, and omniscience; or, to use less Latinately theological terms: for God the Father, power; for God the Son, love; and for God the Holy Spirit, knowledge.

This alignment of the persons of the Trinity with power, love, and knowledge (though each may partake of the characteristics of the others) has been a well-established tradition in Christian theology since the time of Augustine (Whitla 46-51).¹ And in the Renaissance these perfect attributes of the divinity were assigned (in an imperfect, human form) to man, made in God's image. In his devotional poem “The Litanie,” Donne addresses a stanza each to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and then follows with a prayer to the Trinity:

As you distinguish'd undistinct
By power, love, knowledge bee,
Give mee a such selfe different instinct
Of these; let all mee elemented bee,
Of power, to love, to know, you unnumbred three.

[309]

Man's best self, like God's, comprises the elements of power, love, and knowledge.

In nineteenth-century England, these attributes of the deity and of man were given a more popular currency by the so-called Bridgewater Treatises. The Earl of Bridgewater, when he died in 1829, left a large bequest to the Royal Society for the publication of a series of works “On the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation.” These works were duly commissioned and published in the two decades following. The wide publicity of the Bridgewater Treatises is testified by the choice of Bridgewater's name by the phony “Duke” in Huckleberry Finn—where the “Bridgewater” of his claim swiftly degenerates into “Bilgewater” (Twain 100-01).

But the constellation of Power, Love (or Benevolence, or Goodness, as it is moralized), and Knowledge (or Wisdom) is of course not peculiar to Christianity. Its most familiar appearance in classical mythology is in the often-depicted episode of the Judgment of Paris, in which the young Paris has to judge between Hera the queen of heaven, Aphrodite the goddess of love and beauty, and Athena the goddess of wisdom. Each offers Paris the bribe that is hers to give: again, Power, Love, and Knowledge. While “love” in the Christian tradition is caritas, love of humankind, in the classical tradition it is more apt to modulate toward sexual passion, and is often attached closely to beauty and the aesthetic sense. Paris's choice of Aphrodite, because of her offer of the most beautiful woman, leads to the Trojan War: the three attributes, when opposed to one another instead of balanced in a harmonious unity, may be dangerous. The archetype appears in the Hindu world picture too, in which Siva as Power, Vishnu as Love, and Brahma as Knowledge provide a parallel with the Christian Trinity and the classical myth of the Judgment of Paris.² These three, then, Power, Love, and Knowledge, are apt to appear in relation to one another in Christian, classical, and even Eastern works.

They also are found in literature for children. And here the interplay of the three complementary qualities, achieved in the godhead and striven for by the human being, can provide a pattern that is both satisfyingly familiar and inventively varied.

In his sequence of stories about Mowgli in The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895), Kipling makes creative use of this archetype. The narrative about the boy brought up by wolves in the jungle, torn between his inheritance as man and his nurture as wolf, makes its impact as a story about education and the growth of the self. It has strong mythological elements, as many commentators have noticed.³ Its powerful appeal for the adolescent arises from its vivid projection of a protagonist poised between two states: Mowgli is “two Mowglis” (I, “TT” [“Tiger! Tiger!”], 121),⁴ partaking of both animal and human identity, child and adult, outcast and leader; belonging in the jungle paradise, but irresistibly drawn to the dubious haunts of human civilization. The pathos of his condition, also powerfully attractive to the adolescent, is that he doesn't know what is happening to him. He finds himself weeping, and needs to be told what tears are (I, “MB” [“Mowgli's Brothers”], 40); smitten by a crisis of loneliness and sexual longing, “he looked himself over to be sure that he had not trod on a thorn” (II, “SR” [“The Spring Running”], 270).

In this complex “amphibian” existence (Knoepflmacher 521), Mowgli as infant, boy, and man struggles toward consciousness and understanding as toward physical maturity. He is provided with mentors, beings beyond himself who embody the qualities of knowledge, power, and love that he must acquire. It has been noticed, in fact, that “Mowgli is over-lavishly provided with tutors” (Stewart 117). But some, such as Father Wolf, simply teach him the skills of survival as a wolf (I, “MB,” 25), while Messua's instructions pertain to language skills among human beings. More essential to the growth of Mowgli's identity is what he learns from creatures who are neither wolf nor human: first his two sponsors at the looking-over at the Council Rock, Baloo the bear and Bagheera the panther; and to these is added Kaa the python. It is these three mentors who are constructed as the power, love, and knowledge that must become Mowgli's if he is to mature and discover his self. The trio, like the Trinity, are separate and discrete, but also united and complementary. And these mythic roles, whether the reader recognizes them or not, have much to do with the trio's particular appeal as characters and their effectiveness in Mowgli's development.

In the first story, “Mowgli's Brothers,” while Kipling is still getting into his stride, he presents the young human child as eminently educable. He has intelligence, but little experience, and no motive for reflection. He has “nothing in the world to think of except things to eat” (I, 26). He is a tabula rasa, innocent and impressionable, and living safely in the protection of the wolf pack that has accepted him. “I have the Pack and I have thee,” he tells Bagheera, “… and Baloo … Why should I be afraid?” (I, 27). It is Bagheera who awakens him to knowledge of evil as well as good, and alerts him to his precarious status as a man among wolves.

“They hate thee because their eyes cannot meet thine—because thou art wise—because thou hast pulled out thorns from their feet—because thou art a man.”

“I did not know these things,” said Mowgli sullenly.

[I, 30]

But with the astute guidance of Bagheera he is able to hold his own at the Council Rock when the hostile wolves plan to hand him over to his enemy Shere Khan (the Satan of Mowgli's paradise).

It is in the next story, “Kaa's Hunting,” that Kipling presents the trio of mentors in their developed roles of Power, Love, and Knowledge. In fictional time this story is set between the beginning and the end of “Mowgli's Brothers,” when Mowgli is a young boy of seven (the age of rationality), on the threshold of self-awareness. He is also receiving his formal education in the Law of the Jungle. Mowgli is still conceited and unreflecting, but he is about to undergo a lesson and a test. The introductory poem stresses the education theme:

“There is none like to me!” says the Cub in the pride of his
          earliest kill;
But the Jungle is large and the Cub he is small. Let him think
          and be still.

[I, 45]

And as we encounter Mowgli in the classroom scene that opens the story, he is showing off his newly acquired knowledge. Mowgli as human must learn more than any one species, for man's status in the evolutionary scheme does not allow him to specialize:

The big, serious, old brown bear was delighted to have so quick a pupil, for the young wolves will learn only as much of the Law of the Jungle as applies to their own pack and tribe, and run away as soon as they can repeat the Hunting Verse. … But Mowgli, as a man-cub, had to learn a great deal more than this.

[I, 46]

“A Man-cub is a Man-cub, and he must learn all the Law of the Jungle,” Baloo explains (47). This is Kipling's version of T. H. White's fable of the embryos in The Sword in the Stone (1938), in which man achieves his special status in the universe by choosing not to have specialized equipment, such as horns or a thick hide (265-67). He is to dominate by virtue of his adaptability. This is one reason that Mowgli's most significant mentors are neither man nor wolf, but beasts of other species altogether. Mowgli's status in his world is to come from exceeding the limitations both of man and of wolf.

“Kaa's Hunting” is a satisfactory fable of education. The scene opens in a classroom, where Baloo the pedagogue has been teaching Mowgli the Law of the Jungle. Baloo in his partiality claims that Mowgli is “best and wisest and boldest of Man-cubs” (63) (the familiar configuration is already present), but the claim is premature. Mowgli resists the discipline of learning, and so he is appropriately kidnapped by the Bandar-log, the monkey people, who are parodies of the worst of the tribe of men. They claim to be “wise and strong and gentle” (70)—that is, to have knowledge, power, and love—but their claim is spurious; in fact they are ineducable, for “they have no Law. … They have no remembrance” (51-52). Mowgli, who has learned his lessons, is able to use what he has learned to bring his friends Baloo, Bagheera, and Kaa (the power, love, and knowledge that the monkeys will always lack) to his rescue. Once rescued, he again uses what he has learned to thank his rescuers and become reconciled with them. Mowgli's education in this early stage of his career will stand him in good stead in his future adventures and his future development. And his three protectors, with their quasi-allegorized roles, will continue to enable him to grow and learn.

Baloo's role in the trinity is like God's on Mount Sinai. One delivers the Ten Commandments on the tablets of stone, and the other delivers the Law of the Jungle. In his role as teacher Baloo is comic, a “fubsy old pedagogue,” a “housemaster,” as he has been called (Mason 168; Wilson 127). But he is effective, and in “Kaa's Hunting” Mowgli's life depends on the effectiveness of his teaching. In the battle against the monkey horde Baloo relies on brute strength and power: “He threw himself squarely on his haunches … and then began to hit with a regular bat-bat-bat” (74). This suggests the physical aspect of his power. And it is notable that Baloo, like Yahweh, is strong on punishment. He physically disciplines Mowgli both before and after his abduction by the monkeys, and this corporal punishment is seen as just and necessary. But his power is more than strength, and at its best it has almost the force of creation. Like God separating the light from the dark and the waters from the land, Baloo with his law and his discipline imposes order on chaos. The Bandar-log are not only parodies of men: they are a force of chaos and disruption. They lack all distinction, discrimination, memory, and rules. One could as soon build a statue out of dry grains of sand as discern a meaningful social or moral structure to their existence. That is why they are seen as dangerous and despicable in the ordered world of Kipling's jungle. For Mowgli to revert to being one of the monkey-people would be to “reel back into the beast” indeed. (Other writers might present such a race as charming and engaging; and indeed, Disney did so in his animated version of The Jungle Book.)

Baloo as teacher deals in knowledge as well as power. In fact, his knowledge effectively is his power, the power to create and sustain a significant pattern for Mowgli's life in the jungle. He enables Mowgli to find a place among the other species, and to deserve it.

In the later tales, as Mowgli himself becomes strong and informed, Baloo is less prominent. But he is notably present in “How Fear Came,” the tale that presents the Genesis of the jungle. And though on this occasion Hathi the elephant rather than Baloo transmits the myth, Baloo knows it as he knows all the others. And he is present again at the final meeting at the Council Rock to complete the series symmetrically.

The complementary roles of Baloo and Bagheera in Mowgli's education are made clear by a representative exchange between them in “Kaa's Hunting”:

“A man-cub is a Man-cub, [says Baloo] and he must learn all the Law of the Jungle.”

“But think how small he is,” said the Black Panther, who would have spoiled Mowgli if he had had his own way. “How can his little head carry all thy long talk?”

“Is there anything in the Jungle too little to be killed? No. That is why I teach him these things, and that is why I hit him, very softly, when he forgets.”

“Softly! What dost thou know of softness, old Iron-feet?” Bagheera grunted. “His face is all bruised to-day by thy—softness. Ugh!”

“Better he should be bruised from head to foot by me who love him than that he should come to harm through ignorance,” Baloo answered very earnestly.

[I, 47–48]

It sounds like a dialogue of Justice and Mercy. The passage has some theological overtones, and not only in the formal and biblical rhetoric. Baloo's stern though loving ruling that the being who has transgressed must be punished, and Bagheera's eager defense, sound a little like the exchange between God and the Son over the fate of man in book 3 of Paradise Lost. And Baloo's austere “Is there anything in the Jungle too little to be killed?” is a nineteenth-century echo of the Puritan James Janeway's attitude to children: “They are not too little to die, they are not too little to go to Hell” (Darton 56). Bagheera's role here is as appeaser and apologist, tenderly making allowances for man's proneness to fall.

Bagheera performs a Christ-like role in more ways than one. Kipling's clearest signal of his function is in making him a panther, for the panther has been the symbol of Christ since medieval times. In the twelfth-century bestiary translated by T. H. White, the panther is described as “most beautiful and excessively kind. … The true Panther, Our Lord Jesus Christ, snatched us from the power of the dragon-devil” (White 14-15). Bagheera is the one who redeems Mowgli at the outset, who “buys” him into the pack at the price of a newly killed bull, when the naked child would otherwise have been handed over to Shere Khan, the satanic tiger. Bagheera doesn't himself turn scapegoat, but he provides one, so that Mowgli may be saved. And when Mowgli leaves the pack to return to humankind at the end, Bagheera buys him out again with another bull. He performs the due ritual at the Council Rock, the spiritual and administrative center of the wolves' society. Kipling's jungle, like Milton's heaven, observes the rigid economics of sacrifice, a life for a life.⁵

If Bagheera is a symbolic embodiment of Christian love, he is also, of course, much more. As Keats recalled in associating “Bacchus and his pards,” the leopard or panther is sacred to Dionysus. In keeping with the classical formulation of the parallel attributes, Bagheera has the beauty and the passion that are associated with Aphrodite's sphere. Except for his two mother surrogates, Raksha the wolf and Messua the woman, Mowgli's associates are all notably masculine.⁶ But Bagheera, with his sinuous movements and exotic beauty, provides a strong and almost feminine contrast to Baloo's straightforward, bachelorish masculinity. If in the Christian tradition the panther is a symbol of Christ, in the classical tradition following Aristotle, the panther is the type of the feminine (Aristotle 801a). Bagheera is expert at persuasion and accommodation. He is also beautiful. Though black, he has “the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk. … He had a voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree, and a skin softer than down” (I, “MB,” 20). He stands for the passional life, including not only sexual passion (in “The Spring Running” he goes courting) but a range of intense emotions that in the Christian scheme would be called sinful: anger, pride, and a fierce sense of honor. These, too, Mowgli learns and makes his own.

The triple association of power, love, and knowledge is completed by Kaa the python, whom Baloo and Bagheera recruit as the indispensable ally in their rescue of Mowgli. Though Baloo, as we have seen, supplies Mowgli with knowledge of the law, Kaa's brand of knowledge might more fitly be called wisdom. It exceeds the mental accumulation of data and laws and the intelligent application of them, and comprehends contradictions and ironies. (Baloo is never any good at irony, and characteristically speaks “earnestly.”) To the monkeys, Kaa is Fear (as Man is Fear in the animals' genesis myth in “How Fear Came”). Kaa opposes the monkeys, the forces of ignorance, not by strength, like Baloo, nor by passionate, ineffective devotion, like Bagheera, but by a hypnotic dance that establishes mastery over the minds of his victims. Like the Holy Spirit to humanity, Kaa moves in mysterious ways. Being footless and cold-blooded, he is alien and undefined to the quadruped mammals, who construct him as Other and find him threatening. “‘He knows more than we,’ said Bagheera, trembling,” when he sees Kaa execute his hypnotic dance (I, “KH” [“Kaa's Hunting”], 81).

Wisdom for Mowgli necessarily comprehends the knowledge of good and evil; and it is appropriate that Kaa the serpent should help to induct him into that knowledge (Wilson 126-27). In “The King's Ankus,” a story as mythically suggestive as Chaucer's “Pardoner's Tale” (on which it is based), Mowgli is clearly located in his jungle paradise when Kaa begins the process of initiating him into man's characteristic sin of avarice. In a glow of physical well-being, Mowgli is basking in the sense that all his essential desires are fulfilled: “What more can I wish? I have the Jungle, and the favour of the Jungle! Is there more anywhere between sunrise and sunset?” (II, 151-52).⁷ To test whether Mowgli indeed has no more to wish for, Kaa leads him to the treasure in the deserted city of Cold Lairs, which is guarded by another serpent (and one more learned in human cupidity). Mowgli is tempted by the beauty of the jeweled ankus that he takes from the hoard, but he himself does not fall. He only witnesses the deadly avarice of the men who find the bauble and kill each other for it. The fall of man on this occasion does not include the fall of Mowgli, whose nurture with animals has made him immune from this particular sin. (He is indifferent to money, and calls it “the stuff that passes from hand to hand and never grows warmer” [II, “LJ” [“Letting in the Jungle”], 81].) But his education has progressed in that he has learned more of the evil of his own kind. Bagheera drives the lesson home. When Mowgli tells him to bury the ankus, which as an elephant goad represents human cruelty as well as human avarice, Bagheera points out, “I tell thee it is not the fault of the blood-drinker [the ankus]. The trouble is with the men” (II, “KA” [“The King's Ankus”], 174). Mowgli has had an effective lesson in the knowledge of good and evil. The serpent's role in Genesis is here split into two: the white cobra performs Satan's role in tempting man to fall, while Kaa as a version of the Holy Spirit has advanced man's consciousness of good and evil, a consummation theologically accepted as the Fortunate Fall. Man's (and Mowgli's) consciousness of good and evil leads to wisdom, and is a necessary condition of his redemption.

Kaa's role as Knowledge becomes clearest of all in “Red Dog.” If “How Fear Came” and “The King's Ankus” are genesis myths, “Red Dog” is closer to being classical epic. Like the Iliad and the Aeneid, it shows the clash of two races, with heroic battles and fierce individual encounters; its rhetoric is formal and poetic, the dialogue decorative and ceremonious; and Kaa the python provides the epic “machinery.” Mowgli plays the role of the crafty Odysseus who defeats the enemy by employing a stratagem; and Kaa instructs him on the means to destroy the Red Dog as Athena prompted Odysseus's scheme of the Trojan horse.⁸ Mowgli, who has developed in humility since the days of “Kaa's Hunting,” comes explicitly to seek Kaa's advice. “I am not wise nor strong. Hast thou a better plan, Kaa?” (II, “RD” [“Red Dog”], 233). (In the same way the epic poet of Paradise Lost addresses his muse, the Holy Spirit: “Instruct me, for Thou know'st” [I, 19].) Kaa, thus consulted, settles down to remembrance of things past, recalling all that has happened in the two hundred years since he hatched from the egg; and comes up with a plan that will be a deliberate reenactment of an accidental occurrence of the past: “What will be is no more than a forgotten year striking backward,” he says (233). When Kaa has unfolded his plan, Mowgli makes his tribute: “Kaa, thou art, indeed, the wisest of all the Jungle” (238).

As Mowgli goes about enacting the scheme, we see him at the height of his development, and bringing to bear a lifetime of training among the animals and observation among men. The stratagem of luring the Red Dog among the bees and himself escaping to fight the survivors downriver calls on all his varied powers:

“Mowgli the Frog I have been,” said he to himself; “Mowgli the Wolf have I said that I am. Now Mowgli the Ape must I be before I am Mowgli the Buck. At the end I shall be Mowgli the Man.”

[241–42]

As he has learned to add Kaa's wisdom to Baloo's power and Bagheera's passion, so he has confirmed his mastery as man, the animal who is fully adaptable.

At the end of “The Spring Running,” the last of the Mowgli stories, Mowgli takes leave of his three mentors at the Council Rock. Kipling is winding up the different thematic and symbolic strands. Mowgli is still “two Mowglis,” wolf and human, and drawn in two directions:

“By night and by day I hear a double step upon my trail. When I turn my head it is as though one had hidden himself from me that instant. I go to look behind the trees and he is not there. I call and none cry again; but it is as though one listened and kept back the answer.”

[II, 291–92]

It has come to pass “that Mowgli should drive Mowgli back to the Man-Pack” (292). At the ritual leave-taking, Baloo, now very old, first takes the floor, reminding us of his role: “I taught thee the Law. It is for me to speak” (293). Mowgli's “wisdom and strength,” he says, have saved the wolf pack. Love he does not mention for the moment, for at this point only Kaa and Baloo, of the three, are present. Kaa too is there with his wisdom to impart: “‘Having cast the skin,’ said Kaa, ‘we may not creep into it afresh. It is the Law’” (293). It is the wisdom for all seasons, from Milton's “To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new” to Tennyson's

The old order changeth, yielding place to new, …
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

And at last Bagheera joins the scene, having been delayed by bringing the sacrificial bull that is to buy Mowgli out of the wolf pack again so that he may return to his own kind. He too provides a reminder of his role. His last words to Mowgli are “Remember, Bagheera loved thee” (294).

The last of the contents of The Second Jungle Book is “The Outsong,” “the song that Mowgli heard behind him in the Jungle” as he leaves it. Like Donne's “The Litanie,” it is divided into four parts, one for each person of the trinity, and a final part devoted to “The Three.” Baloo counsels “Keep the law,” and envisages the law as the Trail, a structured path through experience. Kaa presents a series of wise saws in oracular imagery, and instructs on language and appropriate silence. Bagheera recalls his own hard-won knowledge of men, and cautions Mowgli, “Feed them silence when they seek / Help of thine to hurt the weak.” The burden of the combined song of the three is to enjoin upon Mowgli “Wisdom, Strength and Courtesy.” The tripartite structure of “The Outsong” echoes in brief the developed roles of Mowgli's animal trinity.

The power that Baloo supplies Mowgli is less mere physical strength than that which derives from discipline and control, and a full knowledge and observance of appropriate law. The love of Bagheera bears some relation to the Christian caritas (Mowgli refuses to kill his own kind, and spares even the white cobra who had tried to kill him), but is also recognizable as the emotional intensity that makes him a memorable and sympathetic protagonist. The knowledge of Kaa completes him, and enables him to be the savior of the wolf pack before he leaves them. The interdependence of the three is poignantly demonstrated when Bagheera, usually proudly self-sufficient, first joins forces with Baloo in order to save Mowgli, and then is forced to call for help to Kaa in order to save himself. He uses the snakes' call, “We be of one blood, ye and I” (I,“KH,”74). The three characters and the qualities they represent are not discrete entities, but each partakes partially of the characteristics of the others: Baloo deals in power, law, order, and discipline; but he is also knowledgeable and loving. Bagheera provides a model of sacrifice and devotion; but he is also astute and physically powerful. Kaa is the wisest in the jungle, but he is also beautiful and affectionate like Bagheera, and strong like Baloo: “wise, old, strong, and most beautiful Kaa,” Mowgli calls him (II,“RD,”230). Together they form a trio for Mowgli's development of self, as the Trinity acts for the salvation of the Christian, or the three goddesses enlarge the world for Paris.

So far I have developed a set of correspondences that may be rendered diagrammatically thus:

Attributes	The Christian Trinity	Judgment of Paris	Rewards	Jungle Books
Power	God the Father	Hera (Juno)	Power	Baloo
Love	Son	Aphrodite (Venus)	Love / Beauty	Bagheera
Knowledge	Holy Spirit	Athena (Minerva)	Wisdom	Kaa

It is possible to find further parallels to the three attributes in various branches of traditional learning also.⁹ During the Renaissance the assumption that man was made in God's image was extended to physiology, and as a complement to the derived classical belief in the four humors there was a theory of three. Man's functions—as described, for instance, by Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy (I,i,2,3)—are the physical or appetitive, the passional, and the rational. Each of these modes of being has its “seat” in the human body. The seat of reason is the brain, the seat of passion is the heart, and the seat of the appetites is the liver.

When one contemplates these familiar organs in the context of children's literature, something chimes with a familiar ring. Who seeks a brain, who seeks a heart, and who seeks … ? Why, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Lion, of course, in The Wizard of Oz. Well, the Cowardly Lion seeks courage, let it be admitted, rather than a liver per se. But the two have been closely connected in the popular imagination as well as in the Renaissance mind, for a sturdy liver was believed to make for a courageous man, a sickly liver for a pusillanimous one. (The term “lily-livered” is still extant as an epithet for a coward.) To the above diagram on the variations on the Power/Love/Knowledge trinity, then, we may add two further columns:

	Location in the Body	The Wizard of Oz
Power	Liver	Cowardly Lion
Love (passion)	Heart	Tin Woodman
Knowledge (reason)	Brain	Scarecrow

Dorothy's three memorable companions—“her strangely assorted company,” as Baum called them (114)—have been a major element in the first success and continued popularity of The Wizard of Oz. The New York Times review of September 8, 1900, singled out the trio for special comment:

A Scarecrow stuffed with straw, a tin woodman, and a cowardly lion do not, at first blush, promise well as moving heroes in a tale when merely mentioned, but in actual practice they take on something of the living and breathing quality that is so gloriously exemplified in the “Story of the Three Bears,” that has become a classic.

[Hearn 35–36]

Their being a trio like the three bears, and not just assorted individuals, clearly has something to do with their particular appeal. It has been pointed out that between them, they represent animal, vegetable, and mineral (Hearn 148). Nearly all critical treatments of the work focus on Dorothy as protagonist and her three companions. As Edward W. Hudlin points out in a recent essay on the mythology of Oz, “The subplots concerning these characters develop the major mythic themes of the work” (453).

Baum himself seems to have been unconscious that the ongoing pattern of ideas that I have been discussing informs his work. He told an interviewer, “The Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the cowardly Lion were real children of my brain, having no existence in fact or fiction until I placed them in the pages of my book” (Hearn 49). He refers to them as Dorothy's “unique companions”—a rather surprising choice of phrase when one considers how many analogues exist for this configuration of the familiar trilogy of Power, Love, and Knowledge. But his unconsciousness of the analogues suggests that we are dealing here not just with an articulated system of ideas, but with an archetype. This configuration of qualities seems to exist in the collective unconscious, and to be thrown up to the conscious level in the minds of various artists from different cultural backgrounds. Baum was far from being an orthodox Christian, but when he spoke of the creation of The Wizard of Oz he suggested that he had been moved by something like divine inspiration. According to the Reverend Mr. Ryland,

I once asked him how he came to write the first Oz book. “It was pure inspiration,” he said. “It came to me right out of the blue. I think that sometimes the Great Author has a message to get across and He has to use the instrument at hand. I happened to be that medium, and I believe the magic key was given me to open the doors to sympathy and understanding, joy, peace and happiness.”

[Hearn, 73]

Making allowances for wide divergence in tone and cultural background, one can still recognize some affinity between Baum, the humble medium through whom the Great Author delivers truths about the Lion, the Woodman, and the Scarecrow, and Milton, the epic poet who calls upon the Heavenly Muse to help him to dramatize the relations of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and so justify the ways of God to men.

Baum's use of these traditional and archetypal elements is unique, however. He has inventively varied their presentation, especially in inverting their authority. Kipling gives Baloo, Bagheera, and Kaa to Mowgli as mentors and authority figures, but Dorothy's companions follow her instead of leading her. They are, after all, in the allegorical structure presented, her own attributes. (In the same way Faithful and Hopeful in The Pilgrim's Progress, a strong influence in American as well as British literature for children, represent not only the faithful man and the hopeful man, but also Christian's own faith and hope.) Baum's pilgrimage is a democratized configuration, as is appropriate in an American tale. The Scarecrow, Woodman, and Lion, in their quests for brain, heart, and courage, are engagingly humble, for each thinks he most lacks what he most signally possesses. Dorothy uses her companions to achieve her own quest, while simultaneously furthering theirs.¹⁰ For Dorothy, getting home to Kansas is growing up and achieving her identity. She, like Mowgli, is using her knowledge, love, and power to develop her own selfhood.¹¹

There are, of course, major differences between the two works, deriving from the differing worldview of their authors. Kipling is a British imperialist, and presents a boy protagonist; Baum is American, and chooses a girl protagonist. But to explore the considerable national and gender differences in the handling of the pattern is beyond the scope of this essay. For the moment my business is with the pattern they share.

The three companions represent not only Dorothy's knowledge, love, and power, but her desire to possess these attributes, and her own healthy self-doubt. A crucial issue is that of self-confidence. The Scarecrow is notably intelligent, but believes he is brainless. He needs the Wizard not to give him a brain, but to give him confidence in the intelligence he has already. The same applies to the Tin Woodman and his heart. “I have no heart, you know, so I am careful to help all those who may need a friend, even if it happens to be only a mouse” (92). Because he doubts his own compassion, he is especially tender. Consciousness is a major aspect of the Lion's predicament, too. “As long as I know myself to be a coward I shall be unhappy,” he says (67). The Wizard doesn't give him courage, but he supplies him with consciousness of his courage. As Mowgli was shown to be least wise when he showed off about his wisdom, Dorothy's wisdom, like the Scarecrow's, is most evident in her doubt that she has it.

Mowgli's acquaintance with Kaa, Knowledge, came last in the three encounters, when he was already acquainted with Baloo and Bagheera. But for Dorothy the Scarecrow comes first. Knowledge is her priority, as it is his. Like Socrates, Dorothy and the Scarecrow are most wise in believing they lack wisdom, and in seeking it.

“I don't know anything [says the Scarecrow]. You see, I am stuffed, so I have no brains at all. … I don't mind my legs and arms and body being stuffed, because I cannot get hurt. If anyone treads on my toes or sticks a pin into me, it doesn't matter, for I can't feel it. But I do not want people to call me a fool, and if my head stays stuffed with straw instead of with brains, as yours is, how am I ever to know anything?”

“I understand how you feel,” said the little girl.

[38–39]

He is the companion with whom Dorothy can identify most fully.

The Scarecrow is constructed as knowledge in various ways. The story he tells of his own creation by the farmer is a fable of representation, where that which is represented becomes immediately real, and consciousness follows. First the farmer makes his head, on which he paints an ear. As soon as the ear is painted, the Scarecrow can hear with it; and as soon as his eye is painted, he can see with it. The body comes last of all. So he witnesses his own creation, and is soon able to articulate it in speech too (43-44). We follow the dawning of his consciousness step by step as his body is created; and the body is subordinate to the consciousness.

The Holy Spirit is the least substantial of the persons of the Trinity; and the Scarecrow's identity is similarly hardly resident in his body. His body can be dismantled and scattered, as it is by the winged monkeys, and yet he doesn't die, and his identity remains intact: once he is reassembled, he is the same Scarecrow again.

The Tin Woodman seeks a heart that will give him the power to love. His role in the trinity is that of the Son. The creation myth that Baum provides for him—his gradual metamorphosis from flesh to tin—is one of suffering through loss. The wicked witch damages him for loving the Munchkin girl. Being made of tin, he loses and laments his love for her, but his loss of sexual love has the effect of increasing his compassion and tenderness for the rest of creation. Later he suffers and perishes for Dorothy's sake, being smashed on the rocks by the winged monkeys. But presently he is resurrected by the Winkie Tinsmiths, and thereafter he is empowered and made royal. He doesn't exactly sit “at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty,” but he does become king of the Winkies.¹²

“The Cowardly Lion,” says Edward Hudlin, “is the symbol of latent and overt power” (454). While the mythic pattern that he finds in The Wizard of Oz is different from the pattern I am exploring, Hudlin's independent identification of the Lion with Power helps to confirm my argument. The Lion is the “King of Beasts” from the outset (65), and he is also physically large and strong. He performs feats of strength and daring—such as leaping the chasm with a passenger on his back, and defeating the Kalidahs—and takes on the role of the strong member of the group. He also reinforces the lesson that power and strength alone are not sufficient for victory: he needs to be rescued from the field of poppies by the courtesy of the mice. Such incidents remind us of other such fables of the association of strength with sensitivity, such as the story of Androcles and the lion, and the lion killed by Samson: “Out of the strong came forth sweetness” (Judges 14:14).

The three companions are made one (with each other as with Dorothy) in the series of episodes in which they have their separate interviews with the Wizard of Oz in his various manifestations. Perhaps by way of avoiding too predictable a scheme, and perhaps in order to show his characters' interdependency, Baum switches around the expected images. Oz appears as “an enormous Head, without body to support it or any arms or legs whatever” (120) not to the Scarecrow as we would expect (since he is in search of a brain), but to Dorothy. He appears as “a most lovely lady” (124) not to the Woodman, as we would expect (since he wants to love his Munchkin girl again), but to the Scarecrow. He appears as “a most terrible Beast” (128) not to the Lion, but to the Woodman. And to the Lion he appears as “a Ball of Fire,” although it is the Scarecrow who has identified a lighted match as the one thing he most fears. But perhaps these inept manifestations are simply one more sign that Oz is not a very good wizard.

Dorothy's three companions, then, like Mowgli's, are variations on a recurring archetype of the relation of Power, Love, and Knowledge, and cover, like his, the physical, emotional, and intellectual life. They provide both the satisfaction of a recognizable pattern and the pleasure of a new and original formulation of it. The girl's “strangely assorted company,” so strikingly bizarre and original, are yet recognizable as embodying the three attributes, and have kinship with configurations as ancient and respectable as the Christian Trinity and the judgment of Paris.

Archetypes recur. And by way of demonstrating the recurrence of this one it is worth tracing some of the variations on it in familiar works of literature. I present the following examples in no particular hierarchy, for myths are independent of categories of quality. And I apologize in advance for the rather breathless pace of the listing. My purpose here is to accumulate examples in order to demonstrate the universality of the pattern, rather than to compare and analyze.

Dumas's three musketeers provide a familiar and popular version of the Knowledge/Love/Power trio: D'Artagnan, his protagonist, has as his co-mates the intelligent and sensitive Athos, the passionately intriguing Aramis, and the massively powerful Porthos. For the disempowered woman the attributes can be in painful conflict: George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver, in The Mill on the Floss, is ultimately destroyed by the conflict between the three men in her life, who are embodiments of the familiar configuration: Philip Wakem lends her books and provides her aesthetic and intellectual awakening; Stephen Guest is the passionate lover; and her disciplinarian brother Tom sternly insists that she follow the rules laid down by her father. A recent version of the trio occurs in William Goldman's The Princess Bride, where the princess has three men as allies: Westley provides the intelligence (and at one point his body from the neck down is paralyzed, so that he is virtually a brain without a body); Inigo, a romantic Spaniard motivated by revenge and wielding a sword, is passion; and Fezzik, an amiable giant, all brawn and no brain, is power. The three act as a team, and complement each other's operations.

The pattern may be inverted when the attributes become the hero's antagonists rather than his allies. The most salient example is Milton's dark parody of the Trinity in Paradise Lost: Satan the father (“father of all lies” as well as of his daughter Sin and his son Death); Sin, who in keeping with Milton's misogyny is the Daughter rather than the Son, and a lascivious being who enters into incestuous sexual relations with both her father and her son; and Death, “The other shape, / If shape it might be calld that shape had none” (Milton, II. 666-67). (The “holy spirit” of the trinity is frequently ineffable or amorphous.) Dickens provides at least two diabolic trinities in which Power, Love, and Knowledge show their dark sides. The three villains in Oliver Twist are the violent Bill Sikes, who as housebreaker and murderer represents the inverse of God the creator and lawgiver; Oliver's half-brother Monks, who professes himself to be motivated by hatred rather than love; and Fagin the corrupter and informer, who knows everybody's secret. Bill Sikes says Fagin looks like “a ugly old ghost just rose from the grave” (136), an appropriate description for the evil shadow of the Holy Spirit (McMaster 263-77). Similarly, in Barnaby Rudge Dickens supplies an appropriate trio to lead the mob: for power the brutish Hugh, for love the hangman Dennis, and for knowledge the madman Barnaby. In Victory Conrad too presents an evil trio as the antagonists for his protagonist Heyst: Jones, Ricardo, and the Neanderthal Pedro represent, says Heyst, “evil intelligence, instinctive savagery, arm in arm; the brute force is at the back” (329).

One role of the critic is like that of Baloo the lawgiver: to perceive order and to transmit it, and so to enlarge consciousness. On the face of it, Kipling's Mowgli tales in the two Jungle Books, set in the Indian jungle and dealing with actual though anthropomorphized animals, are a world apart from Baum's whimsical fantasy that begins in Kansas but transmigrates to an invented land peopled by animated androids. But the two narratives have a common integrating principle: they both deal with the maturation of a young protagonist, and both provide for the protagonist a trio of companions who are there to supply wholeness through difference. By them the protagonist is empowered and put in contact with his or her own physical, emotional, and intellectual life. Mowgli learns from, and then masters, the parts of the integrated system represented by Baloo, Bagheera, and Kaa. Dorothy helps and is helped by her self-deprecating companions, the Lion, Tin Woodman, and Scarecrow, who enable her to complete her pilgrim's progress from Kansas to Oz and back. And both their stories belong in a family of narratives that are informed by the archetype of the Trinity as a representation of a harmonious relation between Power, Love, and Knowledge.

Notes

1. William Whitla, in his study of the incarnation in Browning's poetry, traces the history of this idea more fully than I can here.

2. For the addition of this Hindu schema (which may have had as much influence on Kipling in his presentation of the Indian jungle as the orthodox Western Trinity), I am indebted to Cynthia Leenerts of George Washington University.

3. For instance, J. M. S. Tompkins: “The realm of wonder extends beyond the limits of myth” (69); Philip Mason: “The Mowgli stories … succeed because they give shape and form to archetypal fantasies about the self” (169); Robert F. Moss: “The Mowgli stories reach well beyond naturalism into fable and myth” (110).

4. Quotations from Kipling are from The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book. For ease of reference, and so that quotations may be located in any edition, I use “I” and “II” for the two volumes, and abbreviated titles for the different stories: “Mowgli's Brothers,” MB; “Kaa's Hunting,” KH; “Tiger! Tiger!” TT; “How Fear Came,” HFC; “Letting in the Jungle,” LJ; “The King's Ankus,” KA; “Red Dog,” RD; “The Spring Running,” SR. I include the poems under the titles of the stories with which they are associated. I do not deal with “In the Rukh,” the story sometimes included with the Mowgli stories but written and published separately before them.

5. Philip Mason points out that Kipling “absorbs from the Judaism of the Old Testament a sense of the sacredness of the law, of the necessity for atonement and restoring the balance, of the presence of a righteous anger at the heart of things” (311).

6. Mason notes the almost exclusively masculine personnel in the series, and aligns it with “the world of the Club and the House of Commons” (167). Lionel Trilling has also pointed out the numerous parent surrogates for Mowgli, “the fathers far more numerous than the mothers” (86).

   Kipling's stories for children are, of course, not peculiar in containing a high proportion of males. The same can be said, for instance, of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908) and Tolkien's The Hobbit.

7. See Constance Sheerer: “India, for Kipling, represented the Lost Paradise” (27).

8. The memorable passage of decorative prose in “The King's Ankus,” describing the wrestling match between Mowgli and Kaa, is probably a reminiscence of the narrative about the Trojan horse in the Aeneid. “The beautiful, statue-like group” of boy and serpent (II, 150) recalls the Laocoön, one of the most famous of classical sculptures. Laocoön was the Trojan who advised against bringing the wooden horse into Troy, and was destroyed, along with his two sons, by two serpents sent by Minerva/Athena. See book 2 of Virgil's Aeneid.

9. See, for instance, Ficino, the Neoplatonist reconciler of pagan philosophy with Christian thought: “No reasonable being doubts … that there are three kinds of life: the contemplative, the active, and the pleasurable (contemplativa, activa, voluptuosa). And three roads to felicity have been chosen by men: wisdom, power, and pleasure (sapientia, potentia, voluptas)” (Wind 82).

10. According to Douglas J. McReynolds and Barbara J. Lips, Dorothy “makes men whole”: her three male companions find wholeness only in relation to her. “She makes caricatures into real ones, and does it without losing her own identity in theirs” (90). But these characters are also projections of her own qualities—of her desire for knowledge, wisdom, and power as well as her possession of them.

11. Raylyn Moore also reads The Wizard of Oz allegorically: Dorothy's “story is seen to be an allegory of self-reliance, bolstered by the similar experiences of her companions, the Lion, Woodman, and Scarecrow” (135).

12. Edward Hudlin considers the Scarecrow rather than the Woodman to be “the dying and resurrected Corn God … the Osiris to [Dorothy's] Isis” (453). Though I differ from him in this identification, we agree in assigning mythic significance to Dorothy's companions.

Works Cited

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