Where the Two Came to Their Father: A Navaho War Ceremonial (Book and complete set of 18 Prints)

Where the Two Came to Their Father: A Navaho War Ceremonial given by Jeff King, Text and Paintings Recorded by Maud Oakes, Commentary by Joseph Campbell. The Bollingen Series I. First Edition, New York, Pantheon Books Inc., 1943. The Complete Portfolio of 18 large (18 X 23 inches) pochoir prints with the accompanying original 1943 booklet (9 X 12 inches), 92 pages. The prints are in Very Good Plus condition, with no pin holes, no tears, no noticeable stains. The only visible flaws are small creases on one corner of each print, not extending into the printed area. The booklet is Very Good with clean unmarked pages but with a taped reinforced spine. A complete set of prints from the 1943 edition in this condition is scarce since many sets were split up to be framed as artworks.

The paintings by the Navajo Medicine Man Jeff King were executed in corn meal, ground flowers, and the pollen of flowers and trees rather than the more common sand. This accounts for the subtle colors of the prints. These were done on buckskin and destroyed after the ceremony.

Pochoir is a stencil-based printing technique. It is both labor and time-consuming, making it an expensive and slow process of printmaking. As a result techniques such as lithography and serigraphy, mechanized in nature, replaced pochoir as a method of reproduction.

Included is the 1969 first edition paperback in Fine condition which contains the 1943 text, a new Foreward to the Third Edition by William McGuire, the Preface to the Second Edition by Maud Oakes and Joseph Campbell, and color reproductions of the plates. A reading copy with added content to save wear on the 1943 original.

Also included is a copy of the 1944 review of this publication by the New York Times.

"As the first publication of the Bollingen Series, Where the Two Came to Their Father set the high standard for the pioneering explorations of human creativity and spirituality that have followed. This work takes its title from the richly symbolic creation legend of the Navaho people, which they incorporated into their blessing ceremony for tribe members headed to battle. Having observed this rite during World War II, when native Americans were for the first time drafted into the U.S. military, ethnologist Maud Oaks recorded the legend and made reproductions of the beautiful ceremonial paintings, given to her by the medicine man Jeff King..."

"The legend recounts the birth of twin heroes, Monster Slayer and Child Born of Water, and how they traveled to the House of the Sun to find their supernatural Father, then returned to earth stronger and wiser. This is a myth not only of creation but also of kindness, death, and deception, and the ritual embodying it is seen as imparting to the warrior a divine source of power." - From the blurb on the back of the 1969 paperback edition.