The Three Christs of Ypsilanti

by Milton Rokeach

  I ask Joseph what Leon has been talking about and he replies: “About a relic, like a symbol, an amulet.” He avoids any mention of the sexual aspect. I ask Leon to tell us again how he made the relic. Joseph still avoids any mention of the way Leon “blessed” the relic. But at this point in the exchange Joseph diverts the conversation in an extraordinary way: he balances a cigarette on his nose.

  July 29. The meeting drags on; nobody wants to say anything. I prod Leon, who is chairman, to keep the conversation going. He says he’s sleepy. He believes in meditative silence. When I insist that the chairman is responsible for the discussion, Leon comments that these meetings are coming to an end, when the shaking off takes place. He hasn’t cared for these meetings, he says, since the first day. Joseph says he’s marking time too; that’s all he can do. I complain that the interest in the meetings has deteriorated.

  “Listen!” says Leon. “Meditative silence is a healthy thing for a person and puts a person in their own focal point.”

  —Up to a point. Too much isn’t healthy.—

  “There are people who can do it for years.”

  —Psychiatrists call that withdrawal.—

  “There’s such a thing as withdrawal because of external influences and there’s also internal perspective because of the love of the internal perspective. Free choice of the individual—this is sound.”

  As the meeting adjourns I announce that the following week all meetings will be held at 3:00 p.m. sharp in A building and will be only for those who want to come. Moreover, I continue, it’s up to the men to get there by themselves. My purpose here was to find out whether they would still come to the meetings if they had to take the initiative of picking themselves up and going somewhere else to attend.

  August 1. Monday. Today is the first day that the voluntary meetings are to be held in A building. Will the three men come? I am fairly sure that Clyde and Joseph will arrive, but not the least bit sure about Leon.

  At three o’clock, none of them has shown up. Not one. We go out to investigate. A phone call to the ward reveals that Joseph is still there. We drive to the store. Clyde is there, drinking a double cola. Where is Leon? We scour the area, but he is nowhere in sight. We give up. We then phone the ward again. Would the aide try to find out from the men at supper tonight how the meeting went?

  We decide to continue this procedure for a few more days, and then to interview the men and try to find out more about their reactions—or should I say, their failure to react?

  At supper that evening the aide asks Joseph and Leon how the meeting went. Joseph replies that he didn’t know anything about a meeting, and Leon that he did not go to the meeting but that he was represented there by the cosmic robot image.

  August 4. Interview with Joseph. He says he didn’t go to the meeting at A building because he was sick, and had been keeping pretty much to himself; when he’s sick he is not sociable. He complains that he doesn’t want to work in the vegetable room because it’s not healthy.

  Interview with Leon. I ask him if the men have held any meetings this week, and he says no. I tell him that we missed him at the A-building meetings, and that since neither Clyde nor Joseph came, the research assistant and I held them alone. Leon seems extremely depressed, more depressed than we have ever seen him before. He sighs. I suggest that he stand up and try some exercises. He refuses, accusing me of trying to make him misuse the palms of his hands. He says he has been told not to jump. I do not insist, but instead remind him that we provide individual meetings so that people can get things off their chest. He cuts this short by saying he gets things off his chest to the Righteous Idealed Governor, and he adds that he didn’t go to the meetings because he has his own counsel, which he prefers.

  Resumption of Conflict Between Leon and Joseph

  It became clear very early in the experiment that Leon was an incredibly sensitive observer of human behavior. He knew from the very first why we had come, and even during the period of peace that began with the rotating chairmanship there were subtle indications that he continued to have a solid grasp of our purpose and that he may therefore have anticipated future tension-producing confrontations which could come without warning.

  Prior to Leon’s change of name there had been a marked reduction in conflict among the three men and a marked increase in friendliness among them. The issue of their identity was not raised, and relations seemed to improve all around. But, as we said earlier, this very improvement was probably a threat to Leon; one of the reasons for changing his name to Dung was the need to arrest and possibly suppress the positive feelings he was beginning to develop, especially toward Joseph, as a result of their mutually satisfying everyday relations. Joseph had become a powerful ally on whom he had come to depend—an ally against us, particularly me —and the two men were joined together in an unspoken agreement to avoid the subject of identity and to brush aside all attempts on my part to bring it up.

  But a few weeks after Leon changed his name the “holy alliance” between him and Joseph was broken and conflict erupted once again. This time, however, their struggle was not over identity, but over an even weirder issue: the question of which of them was the rightful owner of a cosmic squelch eye. This running argument went on for several months and perpetuated itself through mutual reinforcement until it spilled over into other areas. Let us look in on the first of these arguments.

  February 29. Meeting. Leon launches into a discussion about cosmic squelch eyes,[3] claiming that he has, in addition to his two eyes, a cosmic squelch eye located in the middle of his forehead. But, Leon adds, “you can lose these eyes through imposition.” He then brings Joseph into the picture. “In my case I prepared myself when Mr. Cassel passed away in connection with that body. I automatically received that eye.”

  Whenever Leon launches into a long, delusional discourse, Joseph typically withdraws into himself. He leafs through a book or magazine, or stares vacantly ahead, or looks out the window. He gives the impression that he is disinterested or bored. But not this time.

  It should be stated that the full psychological meaning of the squelch-eye episode continues to elude us. However, the Biblical reference is inescapable. In Matthew 6:22, we find: “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” Since this verse immediately follows one which Leon quoted on another occasion (see Chapter XIII, p. 216), there can be little doubt that he was familiar with it.

  “Well, I’ll get it back then,” he suddenly says.

  “No, sir,” says Leon, “you cannot because I earned it.”

  “Anything that belongs to me will be mine, not yours. You haven’t earned anything from me.”

  “You’ve imposed on the frequency of my life, I was told.”

  “I think you have T.B. You were told! I don’t give a shit what you’ve been told. I’m getting my values back if it takes a hundred years!”

  (To Leon)—Maybe if you told us how you earned this eye?—

  “I’ve already told you, sir. I don’t care for presumptuousness to the ignorant, when it has already been explained.”

  “I don’t understand a word of it,” Joseph says.

  “I was quite polite. I explained it twice. That’s sufficient.”

  “How come you have three eyes when you only have two eyes?” Joseph asks.

  When we ask Clyde what he thinks, he breaks into a smile. “They keep pretty even—first one and then the other,” he replies.

  “It’s untruthful,” says Joseph.

  “Truth is truth,” Leon replies, “no matter if only one person speaks it.”

  “I know what happened at the table,” Joseph says suddenly. “Ever since then you’ve been picking on me.”

  “I’m trying to be charitable toward all,” says Leon.

  When asked what happened at the table, Joseph replies, pointing to Leon: “He went screwy. He didn’t want to be honest about it. Happened two or three years ago.”

 
“I don’t know what he’s talking about,” Leon retorts.

  For the next four or five months we were to hear many variations of this squelch-eye controversy. Leon would accuse Woman Eve or Mary Gabor or Joseph of having stolen it from him. Sometimes he would accuse me of having stolen it from Woman Eve or Mary Gabor. Joseph would in his turn claim that it was his squelch eye, that he would continue to be a weak God until it was returned, and that it was Dung who had stolen it from him. Leon would often appeal to me to return the squelch eye I had stolen, and Joseph in turn would appeal to me to get his squelch eye back from Leon, so that he could regain his power. And I, in turn, tried very hard to give each of them the squelch eye he so badly needed. But this didn’t seem to help, because Leon and Joseph both insisted that there was one and only one squelch eye.

  I have already said that the squelch-eye controversy spilled over into other areas. One afternoon Leon was writing a letter—to his uncle, he said. Joseph challenged him. “Mr. Dung, you know you have no uncles or parents or sister or even any friends and, furthermore, you tell fibs.” An argument followed.

  Another time, after dinner, Leon sat down immediately next to Joseph; he was doing this, he said, to balance the cosmic energy in the room and not because he had any personal attraction to Mr. Cassel. Joseph exploded: “Mr. Dung doesn’t know what he is talking about; he’s just a big pile of shit.”

  “You are so right, sir,” Leon replied. “I am a big pile of righteous-idealed shit.”

  During one period Leon refused to sign the Chairman List because, he claimed, Joseph wrote his name with a fancy C, and this created a new electronic imposition. Joseph was upset. “It’s my C,” he yelled, “and if you don’t want to follow the rules, we’ll get someone else in here. Mr. Benson and I can get along. I’ve been giving in, but no more. Put someone else in!”

  The battle over the squelch eye came to an end in the latter part of July. Joseph had been hospitalized for several days as a result of an altercation on the ward. A patient named Gibson lay down on Joseph’s bed, and Joseph asked him to lie on his own bed. Gibson, who was easily upset and had assaulted others in the past with little or no apparent provocation, punched Joseph in the face and fractured his cheekbone. Speaking of Joseph’s altercation, Leon had commented: “It was the cosmic evil eye that got him in trouble and it’s the evil eye that I hate.”

  Joseph was very apprehensive when he returned to Ward D-16. At the meeting he said: “I want to ask Dung to give me a hand so they won’t hit me anymore.”

  “When you are in the wrong,” Leon replied, “I can’t be on your side. I heard the discussion. The man told you twice to leave him alone. You took yourself the initiative to drag that man out of bed and he got up and he let you have it. It so happens that you started it and he finished it.”

  Clyde said he saw the fighting and that the other man had been transferred to another ward, but he did not attempt to take sides or to assess blame.

  Joseph, who was still extremely apprehensive that he could be hit again, then expressed the fear that Leon would hit him, and from then on he would no longer stay in the sitting room when Leon was there alone. Thus was disrupted a behavior pattern which had become amazingly stable over the period of a year—Leon and Joseph sitting in close proximity to each other in Ward D-23, then sitting together in their small sitting room in Ward D-16. Leon now occupied the sitting room mainly by himself, except when the men were eating or having their daily meeting.

  Other Changes In Leon’s Delusional System

  In contrast to the significant changes which led up to Leon’s emergence as Dung, relatively few additional changes took place afterwards in his delusional system. We did note some changes in his behavior. He spoke much less about sex, masturbation, manliness, etc., and he dropped the appelation Simplis Christianus Puer Mentalis Doktor. The only significant change in his beliefs was an addendum to his earlier assertion about his foster mothers. He now said that Madame Dr. Blessed Virgin Mary, who was married to his light brother, was also his foster sister. Beyond this there were only minor additions and elaborations in his delusional system.

  The most detailed of his elaborations concerned his new wife. On March 29, Leon stated that when he was fourteen years old he had lost his heart and had not recovered it until November 1959, when he married the Yeti woman. When he leaves for work, he said, his wife takes his heart away and puts a scroll of the Ten Commandments in its place.

  Two days later, when asked why he had written his meeting report on toilet paper, he replied that he needed the other paper for a letter to his wife. His wife’s name was Ruth of Boaz (he pronounced it “Booze”). She had “light brown hair, not combed— it’s natural as it grows. She’s about seven feet tall and more than 200 pounds in weight.” (This was a considerable change from an earlier description of his wife—“four feet ten or eleven, with long hair, pretty and old fashioned.”) When we drew his attention to the fact that Ruth seemed to be quite a bit bigger than he, he replied: “It doesn’t bother me, sir. There’s a difference in age; she’s about fifteen years older, so she’s fifty-three or fifty-four. She’s a stern, strict and lovable woman.”

  It had taken quite a while, Leon went on, to get adjusted to being without a heart. “But it has avoided me from getting attached to individuals and it’s best for my case. Yes, sir, that’s true. It would be a temptation to attachment.”

  Once when we had a visitor from India, Leon responded to a question about his family by saying that the Yeti people had originated through the mating of an Indian woman with a jerboa rat. They had a boy and a girl, who, because they ate too much and were too big, were banished. This boy and girl went up into the mountains, and there began the Yeti tribe.

  Leon reported in June that he had two main foster fathers, a white dove and a jerboa rat. This was a slight change from what he had told us the previous November: then his main foster father was a white dove, and the jerboa rat was an assistant foster father.

  He also said that he was the father of Joseph Gabor, who a few months before had emerged as his light brother, married to the Virgin Mary. This Joseph Gabor used the name Rex rexarum et Domino dominorum, but his reincarnation name was Maximilian. He added that Joseph Gabor “came into the world through my seed.” This latter remark seems to have a double meaning. On the one hand it meant that Leon created Joseph Gabor as his fictitious light brother, as a device which enabled him to get rid of his name Rex rexarum et Domino dominorum and of his delusion that he was married to the Virgin Mary. On the other hand, it meant that Leon’s father, whose name was also Leon, sired Joseph —who is himself.

  I commented to Leon that I had great difficulty understanding all these relationships, and Leon agreed that it was quite complicated. “Fairly deep matter,” he added.

  On June 23, Leon announced a change of attitude toward his mother. “I said before that the Old Witch died through negativism, but this was through duping. It’s possible that she repented, therefore she went to purgatory and later to heaven—possibly. She died from a broken heart, and there’s a possibility she did repent.” He was glad she had repented, and that her past misdemeanors would be burned away in purgatory. She might, through her own free will, have made the choice to repent, and it was a relief to accept things as they are.

  Two days later he added that if the Old Witch had repented she was no longer the Old Witch but Woman Eve. She was also Mary Gabor, and Leon was her foster son, but no blood relation. From this day on, Leon very seldom referred to his mother as the Old Witch, but rather as Woman Eve or Mary Gabor.

  On June 27 I noticed that Leon had not shaved. When I asked him about this, he informed me that he was growing a beard. He was going to prove he had Yeti blood by demonstrating that his beard would grow only one and a half inches and then stop. If his beard grew longer than this, it would mean he did not have Yeti blood. Three days later he backed down somewhat, saying that all his wife’s relations had beards, and that he was waiting for informat
ion from home as to how long these beards grew before stopping. But if his beard grew more than one and a half inches, then WHACK! off it would come.

  By the end of three weeks, Leon, now with a full beard, bore a remarkable resemblance to pictures of Christ.

  [1]Since the events in the several sections of this chapter, and in Chapters IX and X, are concurrent, and broken into separate sequences for topical presentation, a brief chronology of key events in the period covered—January 14 to August 1, 1960—follows:

  Leon’s change of name January 14

  Interest in meetings begins to wane January 29

  Resumption of identity confrontations Feb. 18, 25; June 21, 30; July 18

  “Squelch eye” controversy February 29–July 28

  Increasing conflict between Joseph and Leon March—August

  Leon describes his new wife March 29, 31

  Ground cards issued May 5, 6

  Flora and Fauna Commission May 25–June 27

  Leon relents toward his mother June 23

  Carnival Day June 27

  Leon grows a beard June 27 ff

  Acute loss of interest in meetings July

  Joseph returns from hospital July 28

  Leon henceforth sits alone in sitting room July 28 ff

  Men fail to show up for voluntary meeting August 1

  [2] Luke 13:6–9. “He spake also this parable; A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came and sought fruit thereon, and found none. Then said he unto the dresser of his vineyard, Behold, these three years I come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and find none: cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground? And he answering said unto him, Lord, let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it, and dung it: And if it bear fruit, well: an if not, then after that thou shalt cut it down.”