White Buffalo Calf Woman
Two scouts out looking for game meet a woman in white on the plain; one of them reaches for her and is left a heap of bones, and the other is sent back to tell the camp to prepare. She comes carrying a bundle, gives the people the sacred pipe and the rites that belong with it, and walking away rolls over and becomes a buffalo calf that changes color four times before it is gone. Lakota sacred tradition, transmitted alongside the pipe itself through generations of keepers and set down in English by the holy man Black Elk with Joseph Epes Brown in 1947.
Open White Buffalo Calf Woman in the archive — filters, lineage graph and full facet browsing.
Attributes
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Mode / tone
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 59% · 12 shared
- 49% · 9 shared
- 46% · 8 shared
- 42% · 9 shared
- 41% · 8 shared
- 41% · 8 shared