THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES

JOSEPH CAMPBELL

BO I. L I N G EN

SERIES

XVII

PRINCETON

UNIVERSITY AND

PRESS

P R I N C E T O N

OXFORD

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:''ohi: •• Bough, one-volume edition, p. 386. Copyright, 1922 by The MacmiUan Company and used with their permission). Compare Sigmund Freud: "I recognized the presence of symbolism in dreams from the very beginning. But it was only by degTees and as my experience increased that I arrived at a full appreciation of its extent and significance, and I did so under the influence of . . . Wilhelm Stekel. . . . Stekel arrived at his interpretations of symbols by way of intuition, thanks to a peculiar gift for the direct understanding of them. . . . Advances in psycho-analytic experience have brought to our notice patients who have shown a direct understanding of dream-symbolism of this kind to a surprising extent. . . . This symbolism is not peculiar to dreams, hut is characteristic of unconscious ideation, in particular among the people, and it is to be found in folklore, and in popular myths, legends, linguistic idioms,, proverbial wisdom and current jokes, to a more complete extent than in dreams." {The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by James Strachey, Standard Edition, V, pp. 350-351.) 17

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THE MONOMYTH

MYTH AND DREAM

Ones of the Dream" are not to be confused with the personally modified symbolic figures that appear in nightmare and madness to the still tormented individual. Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problems and solutions shown are directly valid for all mankind. The hero, therefore, is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations to the generally valid, normally human forms. Such a one's visions, ideas, inspirations come pristine from the primary springs of human life and thought. Hence they are eloquent, not of the present, disintegrating society and psyche, but of the unquenched source through which society is reborn. The hero has died as a modern man; but as eternal man—perfected unspecific, universal man—he has been reborn. His second solemn task and deed therefore (as Toynbee declares and as all the mythologies of mankind indicate) is to return then to us, transfigured, and teach the lesson he has learned of life renewed.20

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"I was walking alone around the upper end of a large city, through shimmy, muddy streets lined with hard little houses," writes a modern woman, describing a dream that she has had. "I did not know where I was, but liked the exploring. I chose one street which was terribly muddy and led across what must have been an open sewer. I followed along between rows of shanties and then discovered a little river flowing between me and some high, firm ground where there was a paved street. This was a nice, perfectly clear river, flowing over grass. I could see the grass moving under the water. There was no way to cross, so I went to a little house and asked for a boat. A man there said of course he could help me cross. He brought out a small wooden box which he put on the edge of the river and I saw at once that with this box I could easily jump across. I knew all danger was over and I wanted to reward the man richly. In thinking of this dream I have a distinct feeling that I did not have to go where I was at all but could have chosen a comfortable walk along paved streets. I had gone to the squalid and muddy district because I preferred adventure, and, having begun, I had to go on... . When I think of how persistently I kept going straight ahead in the dream, it seems as though I must have known there was something fine ahead, like that lovely, grassy river and the secure, high, paved road beyond. Thinking of it in those terms, it is like a determination to be born—or rather to be born again—in a sort of spiritual sense. Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find the river of peace or the highroad to the soul's destination."21 The dreamer is a distinguished operatic artist, and, like all who have elected to follow, not the safely marked general highways of the day, but the adventure of the special, dimly audible call that comes to those whose ears are open within as well as is what leads him to the error of supposing that the salvation of the present world-situation might lie in a return to the arms of the Roman Catholic church, 21 Frederick Pierce, Dreams and Personality (Copyright, 1931 by D. Appleton and Co., publishers), pp. 108-109. 19

Dr. Jung points out that he has borrowed his term archetype from classic sources: Cicero, Pliny, the Corpus Hermeticum, Augustine, etc. (Psychology and Religion, par. 89). Bastian notes the correspondence of his own theory of "Elementary Ideas" with the Stoic concept of the Logoi spermatikoi. The tradition of the "subjectively known forms'' (Sanskrit: antarjneya-rupa) is, in fact, coextensive with the tradition of myth, and is the key to the understanding and use of mythological images—as will appear abundantly in the following chapters. ^ This is Geza Roheim's translation of an Australian Aranda term, altjiranga mitjina, which refers to the mythical ancestors who wandered on the earth in the time called altjiranga nakala, "ancestor was." The word altjira means: (a) a dream, (b) ancestor, beings who appear in the dream, (c) a story (Roheim, The Eternal Ones of the Dream, pp. 210-211). 20 It must be noted against Professor Toynbee, however, that he seriously misrepresents the mythological scene when he advertises Christianity as the only religion teaching this second task. AW religions teach it, as do all mythologies and folk traditions everywhere. Professor Toynbee arrives at hi.s misconstruction by way of a trite and incorrect interpretation of the Oriental ideas of Nirvana, Buddha, and Bodhisattva; then contrasting these ideals, as he misinterprets them, with a very sophisticated rereading of the Christian idea of the City of God. This 18

THE MONOMYTH

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DREAM

without, she has had to make her way alone, through difficulties not commonly encountered, "through shimmy, muddy streets"; she has known the dark night of the soul, Dante's "dark wood, midway in the journey of our life," and the sorrows of the pits of hell:" Through me is the way into the woeful city, Through me is the way into eternal woe. Through me is the way among the Lost People.2'2 It is remarkable that in this dream the basic outline of the universal mythological formula of the adventure of the hero is reproduced, to the detail. These deeply significant motifs of the perils, obstacles, and good fortunes of the way, we shall find inflected through the following pages in a hundred forms. The crossing first of the open sewer,23 then of the perfectly clear river flowing over grass,24 the appearance of the willing helper at the critical moment,25 and the high, firm ground beyond the final stream (the Earthly Paradise, the Land over Jordan): 36 these are
22

the everlastingly recurrent themes of the wonderful song of the soul's high adventure. And each who has dared to harken to and follow the secret call has known the perils of the dangerous, solitary transit: A sharpened edge of a razor, hard to traverse, A difficult path is this—poets declare!'21 The dreamer is assisted across the water by the gift of a small wooden box, which takes the place, in this dream, of the more usual skiff or bridge. This is a symbol of her own special talent and virtue, by which she has been ferried across the waters of the world. The dreamer has supplied us with no account of her associations, so that we do not know what special contents the box would have revealed; but it is certainly a variety of Pandora's box—that divine gift of the gods to beautiful woman, filled with the seeds of all the trouble and blessings of existence, but also provided with the sustaining virtue, hope. By this, the dreamer crosses to the other shore. And by a like miracle, so will each whose work is the difficult, dangerous task of self-discovery and self-development be portered across the ocean of life. The multitude of men and women choose the less adventurous way of the comparatively unconscious civic and tribal routines. But these seekers, too, are saved—by virtue of the inherited symbolic aids of society, the rites of passage, the grace-yielding sacraments, given to mankind of old by the redeemers and handed down through millenniums. It is only those who know neither an inner call nor an outer doctrine whose plight truly is desperate; that is to say, most of us today, in this labyrinth without and within the heart. Alas, where is the guide, that fond virgin, Ariadne, to supply the simple clue that will give us courage to
3| Katha Upanishad, 3—14. (Unless otherwise noted, my quotations of the Upanishads will be taken from Robert Ernest Hume, The Thirteen Principal Upanishads, translated from the Sanskrit, Oxford University Press, 1931). The Upanishads are a class of Hindu treatise on the nature of man and the universe, forming a late part of the orthodox tradition of speculation. The

Words written over the Gate of Hell: Per me si va nella citta dolente,
I Cr Yftf SI L7J fldt Cit flilj I'J'lhyV,

Per me si va tra lit Perduta Gente.
- D a n t e , "Inferno," III, 1-3. The translation is by Charles Eliot Norton, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1902); this and the following quotations, by permission of the publishers. 23 Compare Dante, "Inferno," XIV, 76-84, (op. cit,, Vol. I, p. 89): "a little brook, the redness of which still makes me shudder . . . which the sinful women share among them." 2 * Compare Dante, "Purgatorio," XXVIII, 22-30 (op. cit, Vol. II, p. 214,): "A stream . . . which with its little waves was bending toward the left the grass that sprang upon its bank. All the waters that are purest here on earth would seem to have some mixture in them, compared with that which hides nothing."' Dante's Virgil. ^ "Those who in old time sang of the Golden Age, and of its happy state, perchance, upon Parnassus, dreamed of this place: here was the root of mankind innocent; here is always spring, and every fruit; this is the nectar of which each of them tells" ("Purgatorio," XXVIII, 139-144; op.rit.. Vol. II, p. 219).
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face the Minotaur, and the means then to find our way to freedom when the monster has been met and slain? Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos, fell in love with the handsome Theseus the moment she saw him disembark from the boat that had brought the pitiful group of Athenian youths and maidens for the Minotaur. She found a way to talk with him, and declared that she would supply a means to help him back out of the labyrinth if he would promise to take her away from Crete with him and make her his wife. The pledge was given. Ariadne turned for help, then, to the crafty Daedalus, by whose art the labyrinth had been constructed and Ariadne's mother enabled to give birth to its inhabitant. Daedalus simply presented her with a skein of linen thread, which the visiting hero might fix to the entrance and unwind as he went into the maze. It is, indeed, very little that we need! But lacking that, the adventure into the labyrinth is without hope.

The little is close at hand. Most curiously, the very scientist who, in the service of the sinful king, was the brain behind the horror of labyrinth, quite as readily can serve the purposes of freedom. But the hero-heart must be at hand. For centuries Daedahis has represented the type of the artist-scientist: that curiously disinterested, almost diabolic human phenomenon, beyond the normal bounds of social judgment, dedicated to the morals not of his time but of his art. He is the hero of the way of thought — singlehearted, courageous, and full of faith that the truth, as he finds it, shall make us free. And so now we may turn to him, as did Ariadne. The flax for the linen of his thread he has gathered from the fields of the human imagination. Centuries of husbandry, decades of diligent culling, the work of numerous hearts and hands, have gone into the hackling, sorting, and spinning of this tightly twisted yarn. Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the heropath. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.

Tragedy and Comedy

FiciUBE 2. Minotauromachy

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." With these fateful words, Count Leo Tolstoy opened the novel of the spiritual dismemberment of his modern heroine, Anna Karenina. During the seven decades that have elapsed since that distracted wife, mother, and blindly impassioned mistress threw herself beneath the wheels of the train—thus
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terminating, with a gesture symbolic of what already had happened to her soul, her tragedy of disorientation—a tumultuous and unremitting dithyramb of romances, news reports, and unrecorded cries of anguish has been going up to the honor of the bull-demon of the labyrinth: the wrathful, destructive, maddening aspect of the same god who, when benign, is the vivifying principle of the world. Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved. "Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause."28 As Gilbert Murray has pointed out in his preface to Ingram Bywater's translation of the Poetics of Aristotle,29 tragic katharsis (i.e., the "purification" or "purgation" of the emotions of the spectator of tragedy through his experience of pity and terror) corresponds to an earlier ritual katharsis ("a purification of the community from the taints and poisons of the past year, the old contagion of sin and death"), which was the function of the festival and mystery play of the dismembered bull-god, Dionysos. The meditating mind is united, in the mystery play, not with the body that is shown to die, but with the principle of continuous life that for a time inhabited it, and for that time was the reality clothed in the apparition (at once the sufferer and the secret cause), the substratum into which our selves dissolve when the "tragedy that breaks man's face"30 has split, shattered and dissolved our mortal frame.
28 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (The Modern Library; Random House, Inc.), p. £39. *'' Aristotle, On the Art of Poetry (translated by Ingram Bywater, with a preface by Gilbert Murray, Oxford University Press, 1920), pp. 14-16. 30 Robinson Jeffers^Roan Stallion (New York: Horace Liveright, 1925), p. 20.

Appear, appear, whatso thy shape or name, 0 Mountain Bull, Snake of the Hundred Heads, Lion of the Burning flame! 0 God, Beast, Mystery, come!31 This death to the logic and the emotional commitments of our chance moment in the world of space and time, this recognition of, and shift of our emphasis to, the universal life that throbs and celebrates its victory in the very kiss of our own annihilation, this amor fati, "love of fate," love of the fate that is inevitably death, constitutes the experience of the tragic art: therein the joy of it, the redeeming ecstasy: My days have run, the servant I, Initiate, ofldaean Jove; Where midnight Zagreus roves, I rove; I have endured his thunder-cry; Fulfilled his red and bleeding feasts; Held the Great Mother's mountain flame; 1 am set Free and named by name A Bacchos of the Mailed Priests.52 Modern literature is devoted, in great measure, to a courageous, open-eyed observation of the sickeningly broken figurations that abound before us, aroimd us, and within. Where the natural impulse to complain against the holocaust has been suppressed—to cry out blame, or to announce panaceas—the magnitude of an art of tragedy more potent (for us) than the Greek finds realization: the realistic, intimate, and variously interesting tragedy of democracy, where the god is beheld crucified in the catastrophes not of the great houses only but of every common home, every scourged and lacerated face. And there is no make-believe about heaven, future bliss, and compensation, to alleviate the bitter
31 Euripides, Bucchae, 1017 (translated by Gilbert Murray). Ja Euripides, The. Cretans, frg. 475, ap. Porphyry, De abstinentia, IV. 19, trans. Gilbert Murray. See discussion of this verse'by Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to a study of Greek Religion (3rd edition, Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 478-500.

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majesty, but only utter darkness, the void of unfulfillment, to receive and eat back the lives that have been tossed forth from the womb only to fail. In comparison with all this, our little stories of achievement seem pitiful; Too well we know what bitterness of failure, loss, disillusionment, and ironic unfulfillment galls the blood of even the envied of the world! Hence we are not disposed to assign to comedy the high rank of tragedy. Comedy as satire is acceptable, as fun it is a pleasant haven of escape, but the fairy tale of happiness ever after cannot be taken seriously; it belongs to the never-never land of childhood, which is protected from the realities that will become terribly known soon enough; just as the myth of heaven ever after is for the old, whose lives are behind them and whose hearts have to be readied for the last portal of the transit into night—which sober, modern Occidental judgment is founded on a total misunderstanding of the realities depicted in the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedies of redemption. These, in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete. The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. The objective world remains what it was, but, because of a shift of emphasis within the subject, is beheld as though transformed. Where formerly life and death contended, now enduring being is made manifest—as indifferent to the accidents of time as water boiling in a pot is to the destiny of a bubble, or as the cosmos to the appearance and disappearance of a galaxy of stars. Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible. Thus the two are the terms of a single mythological theme and experience which includes them both and which they bound: the down-going and the up-coming (kathodos and anados), which together constitute the totality of the revelation that is life, and which the individual must know and love if he is to be purged

(kathursis = purgatorio) of the contagion of sin (disobedience to the divine will) and death (identification with the mortal form). "All things are changing; nothing dies. The spirit wanders, comes now here, now there, and occupies whatever frame it pleases. . . . For that which once existed is no more, and that which was not has come to be; and so the whole round of motion is gone through again."1'1 "Only the bodies, of which this eternal, imperishable, incomprehensible Self is the indweller, are said to have an end."34 It is the business of mythology proper, and of the fairy tale, to reveal the specific dangers and techniques of the dark interior way from tragedy to comedy. Hence the incidents are fantastic and "unreal": they represent psychological, not physical, triumphs. Even when the legend is of an actual historical personage, the deeds of victory are rendered, not in lifelike, but in dreamlike figurations; for the point is not that such-and-such was done on earth; the point is that, before such-and-such could be done on earth, this other, more important, primary thing had to be brought to pass within the labyrinth that we all know and visit in our dreams. The passage of the mythological hero may be over-ground, incidentally; fundamentally it is inward—into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world. This deed accomplished, life no longer suffers hopelessly under the terrible mutilations of ubiquitous disaster, battered by time, hideous throughout space; but with its horror visible still, its cries of anguish still tumultuous, it becomes penetrated by an all-suffusing, all-sustaining love, and a knowledge of its own unconquered power. Something of the light that blazes invisible within the abysses of its normally opaque materiality breaks forth, with an increasing uproar. The dreadful mutilations are then seen as shadows, only, of an immanent,
33 Ovid, Met/tmorphases. XV, 165-167; 184-185 (translation by Frank Justus Miller, the Loeb Classical Library). 51 Bhagavad Gita. 2:18 (translation by Swami Nikhilananda, New York, 1944).

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T H E MUNOMYTH imperishable eternity; time yields to glory; and the world sings with the prodigious, angelic, but perhaps finally monotonous, siren music of the spheres. Like happy families, the myths and the worlds redeemed are all alike.

THE HERO AND THE GOD destiny of souls, the destiny of Rome, which he was about to found, "and in what wise he might avoid or endure every burden."1'' He returned through the ivory gate to his work in the world. A majestic representation of the difficulties of the hero-task, and of its sublime import when it is profoundly conceived and solemnly undertaken, is presented in the traditional legend of the Great Struggle of the Buddha. The young prince Gautama Sakyamuni set forth secretly from his father's palace on the princely steed Kanthaka, passed miraculously through the guarded gate, rode through the night attended by the torches of four times sixty thousand divinities, lightly hurdled a majestic river eleven hundred and twenty-eight cubits wide, and then with a single sword-stroke sheared his own royal locks—whereupon the remaining hair, two finger-breadths in length, curled to the right and lay close to his head. Assuming the garments of a monk, he moved as a beggar through the world, and during these years of apparently aimless wandering acquired and transcended the eight stages of meditation. He retired to a hermitage, bent his powers six more years to the great struggle, carried austerity to the uttermost, and collapsed in seeming death, but presently recovered. Then he returned to the less rigorous life of the ascetic wanderer. One day he sat beneath a tree, contemplating the eastern quarter of the world, and the tree was illuminated with his radiance. A young girl named Sujata came and presented milk-rice to him in a golden bowl, and when he tossed the empty bowl into a river it floated upstream. This was the signal that the moment of his triumph was at hand. He arose and proceeded along a road which the gods had decked and which was eleven hundred and twenty-eight cubits wide. The snakes and birds and the divinities of the woods and fields did him homage with flowers and celestial perfumes, heavenly choirs poured forth music, the ten thousand worlds were filled with perfumes, garlands, harmonies, and shouts of acclaim; for he was on his way to the great Tree of Enlightenment, the Bo Tree, under which he was to
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• 3 •

The Hero and the God

The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation—initiation—return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth."

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

Prometheus ascended to the heavens, stole fire from the gods, and descended. Jason sailed through the Clashing Rocks into a sea of marvels, circumvented the dragon that guarded the Golden fleece, and returned with the fleece and the power to wrest his rightful throne from a usurper. Aeneas went down into the underworld, crossed the dreadful river of the dead, threw a sop to the three-headed watchdog Cerberus, and conversed, at last, with the shade of his dead father. All things were unfolded to him: the

Viking Press, Inc., 1939), p. 581.

Virgil, Aeneid, VI, 892.

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redeem the universe. He placed himself, with a firm resolve, beneath the Bo Tree, on the Immovable Spot, and straightway was approached by Kama-Mara, the god of love and death. The dangerous god appeared mounted on an elephant and carrying weapons in his thousand hands. He was surrounded by his army, which extended twelve leagues before him, twelve to the right, twelve to the left, and in the rear as far as to the confines of the world; it was nine leagues high. The protecting deities of the universe took flight, but the Future Buddha remained unmoved beneath the Tree. And the god then assailed him, seeking to break his concentration. Whirlwind, rocks, thunder and flame, smoking weapons with keen edges, burning coals, hot ashes, boiling mud, blistering sands and fourfold darkness, the Antagonist hurled against the Savior, but the missiles were all transformed into celestial flowers and ointments by the power of Gautama's ten perfections. Mara then deployed his daughters, Desire, Pining, and Lust, surrounded by voluptuous attendants, but the mind of the Great Being was not distracted. The god finally challenged his right to be sitting on the Immovable Spot, flung his razor-sharp discus angrily, and bid the towering host of the army to let fly at him with mountain crags. But the Future Buddha only moved his hand to touch the ground with his fingertips, and thus bid the goddess Earth bear witness to his right to be sitting where he was. She did so with a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand roars, so that the elephant of the Antagonist fell upon its knees in obeisance to the Future Buddha. The army was immediately dispersed, and the gods of all the worlds scattered garlands. Having won that preliminary victory before sunset, the conqueror acquired in the first watch of the night knowledge of his previous existences, in the second watch the divine eye of omniscient vision, and in the last watch understanding of the chain of causation. He experienced perfect enlightenment at the break of day.37
L

Then for seven days Gautama—now the Buddha, the Enlightened—sat motionless in bliss; for seven days he stood apart and regarded the spot on which he had received enlightenment; for seven days he paced between the place of the sitting and the place of the standing; for seven days he abode in a pavilion furnished by the gods and reviewed the whole doctrine of causality and release; for seven days he sat beneath the tree where the girl Sujata had brought him milk-rice in a golden bowl, and there meditated on the doctrine of the sweetness of Nirvana; he removed to another tree and a great storm raged for seven days, but the King of Serpents emerged from the roots and protected the Buddha with his expanded hood; finally, the Buddha sat for seven days beneath a fourth tree enjoying still the sweetness of liberation. Then he doubted whether his message could be communicated, and he thought to retain the wisdom for himself; but the god Brahma descended from the zenith to implore that he should become the teacher of gods and men. The Buddha was thus persuaded to proclaim the path.3a And he went back into the cities of men where he moved among the citizens of the

" T h i s is tlii1 most import am sin^'l'L monK-nt ni < lr;i.-nl;il n,\ tiiology, a conn-

Enlightenment (the Bo Tree) and Christ on Holy Rood (the Tree of Redemption) are analogous figures, incorporating an archetypal World Savior, World Tree motif, which is of immemorial antiquity. Many other variants of the theme will be found among the episodes to come. The Immovable Spot and Mount Calvary are images of the World Navel, or World Axis (seep. 37, infra). The calling of the Earth to witness is represented in traditional Buddhist art by images of the Buddha, sitting in the classic Buddha posture, with the right hand resting on the right knee and its fingers lightly touching the ground. The point is that Buddhaiiood, Enlightenment, cannot br comiTiiiriicatrd. but only the way to Enlightenment. This doctrine of the incommunicability of the Truth which is beyond names and forms is basic to the great Oriental, as well as to the Platonic, traditions. Whereas the truths of science are communicable, being demonstrable hypotheses rationally founded on observable facts, ritual, mythology, and metaphysics are but guides to the brink of a transcendent illumination, die final step to which must be taken by each in his own silent experience. Hence one of the Sanskrit terms for sage is muni, "the silent one." Sdkyamuni (one of the titles of Gautama Buddha) means "the silent one or sage {muni) of the Sakya clan." Though he is the founder of a widely taught world religion, the ultimate core of his doctrine remain? concealed, necessarily, in silence. 31

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world, bestowing the inestimable boon of the knowledge of the Way. 3 9

The Old Testament records a comparable deed in its legend of Moses, who, in the third month of the departure of Israel out of the land of Egypt, came with his people into the wilderness of Sinai; and there Israel pitched their tents over against the mountain. And Moses went up to God, and the Lord called unto him from the mountain. The Lord gave to him the Tables of the Law and commanded Moses to return with these to Israel, the people of the Lord.40 Jewish folk legend declares that during the day of the revelation diverse rumblings sounded from Mount Sinai, "flashes of lightning, accompanied by an ever swelling peal of horns, moved the people with mighty fear and trembling. God bent the heavens, moved the earth, and shook the bounds of the world, so that the depths trembled, and the heavens grew frightened. His splendor passed through the four portals of fire, earthquake, storm, and hail. The kings of the earth trembled in their palaces. The earth herself thought the resurrection of the dead was about to take place, and that she would have to account for the blood of the slain she had absorbed, and for the bodies of the murdered whom she covered. The earth was not calmed until she heard the first words of the Decalogue. "The heavens opened and Mount Sinai, freed from the earth, rose into the air, so that its summit towered into the heavens, while a thick cloud covered the sides of it, and touched the feet of the Divine Throne. Accompanying God on one side, appeared twenty-two thousand angels with crowns for the Levites, the only tribe that remained true to God while the rest worshiped the Golden Calf. On the second side were sixty myriads, three thousand five hundred and fifty angels, each bearing a crown of lO T Greatly abridged from Jataka, Introduction, i, 58-75 (translated by Henry Clarke Warren, Buddhism in Translations (Harvard Oriental Series, 3') Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1896, pp. 56-87), and the Lalitavutara as rendered by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1916), pp. 24-38. 4U Exodus, 19:3-5.

fire for each individual Israelite. Double this number of angels was on the third side; whereas on the fourth side they were simply innumerable. For God did not appear from one direction, but from all simultaneously, which, however, did not prevent His glory from filling the heaven as well as the earth. In spite of these innumerable hosts there was no crowding on Mount Sinai, no mob, there was room for all.1'41 As we soon shall see, whether presented in the vast, almost oceanic images of the Orient, in the vigorous narratives of the Greeks, or in the majestic legends of the Bible, the adventure of the hero normally follows the pattern of the nuclear unit above described: a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a life-enhancing return. The whole of the Orient has been blessed by the boon brought back by Gautama Buddha—his wonderful teaching of the Good Law—just as the Occident has been by the Decalogue of Moses. The Greeks referred fire, the first support of all human culture, to the world-transcending deed of their Prometheus, and the Romans the founding of their worldsupporting city to Aeneas, following his departure from fallen Troy and his visit to the eerie underworld of the dead. Everywhere, no matter what the sphere of interest {whether religious, political, or personal), the really creative acts are represented as those deriving from some sort of dying to the world; and what happens in the interval of the hero's nonentity, so that he comes back as one reborn, made great and filled with creative power, mankind is also unanimous in declaring. We shall have only to follow, therefore, a multitude of heroic figures through the classic stages of the universal adventure in order to see again what has always been revealed. This will help us to understand not only the meaning of those images for contemporary life, but also the singleness of the human spirit in its aspirations, powers, vicissitudes, and wisdom. The following pages will present in the form of one composite adventure the tales of a number of the world's symbolic carriers of the destiny of F-veryman. The first great stage, that of the
41 Louis Ginzbcrg, The Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia: The Jewish Pubkation Society of America, 1911), Vol. Ill, pp. 90-94.

32

THE MONOMYTH

THF, HERO AND THE GOD out"; (4) "The Crossing of the Return Threshold," or the return to the world of common day; (5) "Master of the Two Worlds"; and (6) "Freedom to Live," the nature and function of the ultimate boon.42 The composite hero of the monomyth is a personage of exceptional gifts. Frequently he is honored by his society, frequently unrecognized or disdained. He and/or the world in which he finds himself suffers from a symbolical deficiency. In fairy tales this may be as slight as the lack of a certain golden ring, whereas in apocalyptic vision the physical and spiritual life of the whole earth can be represented as fallen, or on the point of falling, into ruin. Typically, the hero of the fairy tale achieves a domestic, microcosmic triumph, and the hero of myth a world-historical, macrocosmic triumph. Whereas the former—the youngest or despised child who becomes the master of extraordinar}' powers—prevails over his personal oppressors, the latter brings back from his adventure the means for the regeneration of his society as a whole. Tribal or local heroes, such as the emperor Huang Ti, Moses, or the A2tec Tezcatlipoca, commit their boons to a single folk; universal heroes —Mohammed, Jesus, Gautama Buddha—bring a message for the entire world. Whether the hero be ridiculous or sublime, Greek or barbarian, gentile or Jew, his journey varies little in essential plan. Popular tales represent the heroic action as physical; the higher religions show the deed to be moral; nevertheless, there will be found astonishingly little variation in the morphology of the adventure, the character roles involved, the victories gained. If one or another of the basic elements of the archetypal pattern is omitted from a given fairy tale, legend, ritual, or myth, it is
12 This circular adventure of the hero appears in a negative form in stories of the deluge type, where it is not the hero who goes to the power, but the power that rises against the hero, and again subsides. Deluge stories OCCUT in every quarter of the earth. They form an integral portion of the archetypal myth of the history of the world, and so belong properly to Fart II of the" present discussion: "The Cosmogonic Cycle.'" The deluge hero is a symbol of the germinal vitality of man surviving even the worst tides of catastrophe and sin-'

separation or departure, will be shown in Part I, Chapter I, in five subsections: (1) "The Call to Adventure," or the signs of the vocation of the hero; (2) "Refusal of the Call," or the folly of the flight from the god; (3) "Supernatural Aid," the unsuspected assistance that comes to one who has undertaken his proper adventure; (4) "The Crossing of the first Threshold"; and (5) "The Belly of the Whale," or the passage into the realm of night. The stage of the trials and victories of initiation will appear in Chapter II in six subsections: (1) "The Road of Trials," or the dangerous aspect of the gods; (2) "The Meeting with the Goddess" (Magna Mater), or the bliss of infancy regained; (3) "Woman as the Temptress," the realization and agony of Oedipus; (4) "Atonement with the Father"; (5) "Apotheosis"; and (6) "The Ultimate Boon." The return and reintegration with society, which is indispensable to the continuous circulation of spiritual energy into the world, and which, from the standpoint of the community, is the justification of the long retreat, the hero himself may find the most difficult requirement of all. For if he has won through, like the Buddha, to the profound repose of complete enlightenment, there is danger that the bliss of this experience may annihilate all recollection of, interest in, or hope for, the sorrows of the world; or else the problem of making known the way of illumination to people wrapped in economic problems may seem too great to solve. And on the other hand, if the hero, instead of submitting to all of the initiatory tests, has, like Prometheus, simply darted to his goal (by violence, quick device, or luck) and plucked the boon for the world that he intended, then the powers that he has unbalanced may react so sharply that he will be blasted from within and without— crucified, like Prometheus, on the rock of his own violated unconscious. Or if the hero, in the third place, makes his safe and willing return, he may meet with such a blank misunderstanding and disregard from those whom he has come to help that his career will collapse. The third of the following chapters will conclude the discussion of these prospects under six subheadings: (1) "Refusal of the Return," or the world denied; (2) "The Magic Flight," or the escape of Prometheus; (3) "Rescue from With-

35

THE MONOMVTH

THE WORLD NAVEL

bound to be somehow or other implied—and the omission itself can speak volumes for the history and pathology of the example, as we shall presently see. Part II, "The Cosmogonic Cycle," unrolls the great vision of the creation and destruction of the world which is vouchsafed as revelation to the successful hero. Chapter I, Emanations, treats of the coming of the forms of the universe out of the void. Chapter II, The Virgin Birth, is a review of the creative and redemptive roles of the female power, first on a cosmic scale as the Mother of the Universe, then again on the human plane as the Mother of the Hero. Chapter III, Transformations of the Hero, traces the course of the legendary history of the human race through its typical stages, the hero appearing on the scene in various forms according to the changing needs of the race. And Chapter IV, Dissolutions, tells of the foretold end, first of the hero, then of the manifested world. The cosmogonic cycle is presented with astonishing consistency in the sacred writings of all the continents,41 and it gives to the adventure of the hero a new and interesting turn; for now it appears that the perilous journey was a labor not of attainment but of reattainment, not discovery but rediscovery. The godly powers sought and dangerously won are revealed to have been within the heart of the hero all the time. He is "the king's son" who has come to know who he is and therewith has entered into the exercise of his proper power—"God's son," who has learned to know how nnich that title means. From this point of view the hero is symbolical of that divine creative and redemptive image which is hidden within us all, only waiting to be known and rendered into life. "For the One who has become many, remains the One undivided, but each part is all of Christ," we read in the writings of Saint Symeon the younger (949-1022 A.D.). "I saw Him in my house," the saint goes on. "Among all those everyday things He is The present volume is not concerned with the historical discussion of this circumstance. That task is reserved for a work now under preparation. The present volume is a comparative, not genetic, study. Its purpose is to show that ative, essential parallels exist in the myths themselves as well as in the interpretations le myths themselves and applications that the sages have announced for them. ges

appeared unexpectedly and became unutterably united and merged with me, and leaped over to me without anything in between, as fire to iron, as the light to glass. And He made me like fire and like light. And I became that which I saw before and beheld from afar. I do not know how to relate this miracle to you. . . . I am man by nature, and God by the grace of God."44 A comparable vision is described in the apocryphal Gospel of Eve. "I stood on a loftly mountain and saw a gigantic man and another a dwarf; and I heard as it were a voice of thunder, and drew nigh for to hear; and He spake unto me and said: I am thou, and thou art I; and wheresoever thou mayest be I am there. In all am I scattered, and whensoever thou wiliest, thou gatherest Me; and gathering Me, thou gatherest Thyself."45 The two—the hero and his ultimate god, the seeker and the found—are thus understood as the outside and inside of a single, self-mirrored mystery, which is identical with the mystery of the manifest world. The great deed of the supreme hero is to come to the knowledge of this unity in multiplicity and then to make it known.

The World Nave!

The effect of the successful adventure of the hero is the unlocking and release again of the flow of life into the body of the world. The miracle of this flow may be represented in physical terms as a circulation of food substance, dynamically as a streaming of energy, or spiritually as a manifestation of grace. Such varieties of image alternate easily, representing three degrees of condensation of the one life force. An abundant harvest
44 Translated by Dom Ansgar Nelson, O.S.B., in The Soul Afire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1944), p. 303. 44 Quoted by Epiphanius, Adversus kaereses, xxvi, 3.

36

THE MONOMYTH

THE WORLD NAVEL

is the sign of God's grace; God's grace is the food of the soul; the lightning bolt is the harbinger of fertilizing rain, and at the same time the manifestation of the released energy of God. Grace, food substance, energy: these pour into the living world, and wherever they fail, life decomposes into death. The torrent pours from an invisible source, the point of entry being the center of the symbolic circle of the universe, the Immovable Spot to the Buddha legend,46 around which the world may be said to revolve. Beneath this spot is the earth-supporting head of the cosmic serpent, the dragon, symbolical of the waters of the abyss, which are the divine life-creative energy and substance of the demiurge, the world-generative aspect of immortal being.1' The tree of life, i.e., the universe itself, grows from this point. It is rooted in the supporting darkness; the golden sun bird perches on its peak; a spring, the inexhaustible well, bubbles at its foot. Or the figure may be that of a cosmic mountain, with the city of the gods, like a lotus of light, upon its summit, and in its hollow the cities of the demons, illuminated by precious stones. Again, the figure may be that of the cosmic man or woman (for example the Buddha himself, or the dancing Hindu goddess Kali) seated or standing on this spot, or even fixed to the tree (Attis, Jesus, Wotan); for the hero as the incarnation of God is himself the navel of the world, the umbilical point through which the energies of eternity break into time. Thus the World Navel is the symbol of the continuous creation: the mystery of the maintenance of the world through that continuous miracle of vivification which wells within all things. Among the Pawnees of northern Kansas and southern Nebraska, the priest, during the ceremonial of the Hako, draws a circle with his toe. "Hie circle represents a nest," such a priest is reported to have said, "and it is drawn by the toe because the eagle builds its nest with its claws. Although we are imitating the bird making its nest, there is another meaning to the action;
4fi Supra, p. 30. X i l l s i s i l i e s e r p e n t t i i n t p i ' u t i ' L ' t i . 128. 49

DEPARTURE

THE CALL TO ADVENTURE

FIGURE 3. Osiris in the Form of a Bull Transports His Worshiper to the Underworld

Two dreams will suffice to illustrate the spontaneous appearance of the figure of the herald in the psyche that is ripe for transformation. The first is the dream of a young man seeking the way to a new world-orientation: "I am in a green land where many sheep are at pasture. It is the 'land of sheep.1 In the land of sheep stands an unknown woman and points the way."'
7 C. G. Jung, Psychology ami Alchemy (Collected Works, vol. 12; New York and London, 1953), pars. 71, 73. (Orig. 1935.)

The second is the dream of a young girl whose girl companion has lately died of consumption; she is afraid that she may have the disease herself. "I was in a blossoming garden; the sun was just going down with a blood-red glow. Then there appeared before me a black, noble knight, who spoke to me with a very serious, deep and frightening voice: 'Wilt thou go with me?' Without attending my answer, he took me by the hand, and carried me away."8 Whether dream or myth, in these adventures there is an atmosphere of irresistible fascination about the figure that appears suddenly as guide, marking a new period, a new stage, in the biography. That which has to be faced, and is somehow profoundlyfamiliar to the unconscious—though unknown, surprising, and even frightening to the conscious personality—makes itself known; and what formerly was meaningful may become strangely emptied of value: like the world of the king's child, with the sudden disappearance into the well of the golden ball. Thereafter, even though the hero returns for a while to his familiar occupations, they may be found unfruitful. A series of signs of increasing force then will become visible, until —as in the following legend of "The Four Signs," which is the most celebrated example of the call to adventure in the literature of the world—the summons can no longer be denied. The young prince Gautama Sakyamuni, the Future Buddha, had been protected by his father from all knowledge of age, sickness, death, or monkhood, lest he should be moved to thoughts of life renunciation; for it had been prophesied at his birth that he was to become either a world emperor or a Buddha. The king—prejudiced in favor of the royal vocation—provided his son with three palaces and forty thousand dancing girls to keep his mind attached to the world. But these only served to advance the inevitable; for while still relatively young, the youth exhausted for himself the fields of fleshly joy and became ripe for the other experience.
8 Wilhelm Stekel, Die Sprache des Traurtws (Wiesbaden; Verlag von -I. F. Bergmann. 1911), p. 352. Dr. Stekel points out the relationship of the bloodred glow to the thought of the blood coughed up in consumption.

DEPARTURE The moment he was ready, the proper heralds automatically appeared: "Now on a certain day the Future Buddha wished to go to the park, and told his charioteer to make ready the chariot. Accordingly the man brought out a sumptuous and elegant chariot, and, adorning it richly, he harnessed to it four state horses of the Sindhava breed, as white as the petals of the white lotus, and announced to the Future Buddha that everything was ready. And the Future Buddha mounted the chariot, which was like to a palace of the gods, and proceeded toward the park, " 'The time for the enlightenment of the prince Siddhartha draweth nigh,' thought the gods; 'we must show him a sign1: and they changed one of their number into a decrepit old man, broken-toothed, gray-haired, crooked and bent of body, leaning on a staff, and trembling, and showed him to the Future Buddha, but so that only he and the charioteer saw him. "Then said the Future Buddha to the charioteer, 'Friend, pray, who is this man? Even his hair is not like that of other men.' And when he heard the answer, he said, 'Shame on birth, since to every one that is born old age must come.1 And agitated in heart, he thereupon returned and ascended his palace. " 'Why has my son returned so quickly?' asked the king. "'Sire, he has seen an old man,' was the reply; 'and because he has seen an old man, he is about to retire from the world.1 " 'Do you want to kill me, that you say such things? Quickly get ready some plays to be performed before my son. If we can but get him to enjoying pleasure, he will cease to think of retiring from the world.' Then the king extended the guard to half a league in each direction. "Again on a certain day, as the Future Buddha was going to the park, he saw a diseased man whom the gods had fashioned; and having again made inquiry, he returned, agitated in heart, and ascended his palace. "And the king made the same inquiry and gave the same order as before; and again extending the guard, placed them for three quarters of a league around.

THE CALL TO A D V E N T U R E

"And again on a certain day, as the Future Buddha was going to the park, he saw a dead man whom the gods had fashioned; and having again made inquiry, he returned, agitated in heart, and ascended his palace. "And the king made the same inquiry and gave the same orders as before; and again extending the guard placed them for a league around. "And again on a certain day, as the Future Buddha was going to the park, he saw a monk, carefully and decently clad, whom the gods had fashioned; and he asked his charioteer, 'Pray, who is this man?' 'Sire, this is one who has retired from the world'; and the charioteer thereupon proceeded to sound the praises of retirement from the world. The thought of retiring from the world was a pleasing one to the Future Buddha."5' This first stage of the mythological journey—which we have designated the "call to adventure" —signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown. This fateful region of both treasure and danger may be variously represented: as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state; but it is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, superhuman deeds, and impossible delight. The hero can go forth of his own volition to accomplish the adventure, as did Theseus when he arrived in his father's city, Athens, and heard the horrible history of the Minotaur; or he may be carried or sent abroad by some benign or malignant agent, as was Odysseus, driven about the Mediterranean by the winds of the angered god, Poseidon. The adventure may begin as a mere blunder, as did that of the princess of the fairy tale; or still again, one may be only casually strolling, when some passing
'•' Reprinted by permission of the publishers from Henry Clarke Warren, Buddhism in Translations (Harvard Oriental Series, 3) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1896, pp. 56-57.

D K P A R T U i( E

REFUSAL OK THE CALL

phenomenon catches the wandering eye and lures one away from the frequented paths of man. Examples might be multiplied, ad infmitum, from every corner of the world.1"

Refusal of the Call

Often in actual life, and not infrequently in the myths and popular tales, we encounter the dull case of the call unanswered; for it is always possible to turn the ear to other interests. Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. Walled in boredom, hard work, or "culture," the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved. His flowering world becomes a wasteland of dry stones and his life feels meaningless—even though, like King Minos, he may through titanic effort succeed in building an empire of renown. Whatever house he builds, it will be a house of death: a labyrinth of cyclopean walls to hide from him his Minotaur. All he can do is create new problems for himself and await the gradual approach of his disintegration. "Because I have called, and ye refused . . . I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh; when your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you." "For
10 In the above section, and throughout the following pages, I have made no attempt to exhaust the evidence. To have done so (after the manner, for example, of Frazer, in The Golden Bough) would have enlarged my chapters ppxliijioush without making the main line of the monomyth an;- clearer. Instead, I am giving in each section a few striking examples from a number of widely scattered, represirTirnuv Werner Zirus, Ahasverus, di-r Ewige Jude (Staff- und MotivKes,(.-hichle de deutschen Literatur 6, Berlin and Leipzig, 1930), p. 1. ™ Supra, p. 54.

self, and that not only in its constructive, but also in its destructive aspects. This explains why hardly any productive work gets through without morbid

58

DEPARTURE and the Princess Budur. The young and handsome prince, the only son of King Shahriman of Persia, persistently refused the repeated suggestions, requests, demands, and finally injunctions, of his father, that he should do the normal thing and take to himself a wife. The first time the subject was broached to him, the lad responded: "O my father, know that I have no lust to marry nor doth my soul incline to women; for that concerning their craft and perfidy I have read many books and heard much talk, even as saith the poet: Now, an of women ask ye, I reply: — In their affairs I'm versed a doctor rare! When man 's head grizzles and his money dwindles, In their affection he hath naught for share. And another said: Rebel against women and so shalt thou serve Allah the more; The youth mho gives women the rein must forfeit all hope to soar. They'll baulk him when .seeking the strange device, Excelsior, Tho' waste he a thousand of'years in the study of science and lore." And when he had ended his verses he continued, "O my father, wedlock is a thing whereto I will never consent; no, not though I drink the cup of death." When the Sultan Shahriman heard these words from his son, light became darkness in his sight and he was full of grief; yet, for the great love he bore him, lie was unwilling to repeat his wishes and was not angry, but showed him all manner of kindness. After a year, the father pressed again his question, but the youth persisted in refusal, with further stanzas from the poets. The king consulted with his wazir, and the minister advised: "O king, wait another year and, if after that thou be minded to speak to him on the matter of marriage, speak not to him privily, but address him on a day of state, when all the emirs and wazirs are present with the whole of the army standing before thee. And when all are in crowd then send for thy son, Kamar al-Zaman, and summon him; and, when he cometh, broach to him the matter of marriage before the wazirs and grandees and officers of

REFUSAL OF THE CALL state and captains; for he will surely be bashful and daunted by their presence and will not dare to oppose thy will.1" When the moment came, however, and King Shahriman gave his command before the state, the prince bowed his head awhile, then raising it towards his father, and, being moved by youthful folly and boyish ignorance, replied: "But for myself I will never marry; no, not though I drink the cup of death! As for thee, thou art great in age and small of wit: hast thou not, twice ere this day and before this occasion, questioned me of the matter of marriage, and I refused my consent? Indeed thou dotest and art not fit to govern a flock of sheep!" So saying Kamar al-Zaman unclapsed his hands from behind his back and tucked up his sleeves above his elbows before his father, being in a fit of fury; moreover, he added many words to his sire, knowing not what he said, in the trouble of his spirits. The king was confounded and ashamed, since this befell in the presence of his grandees and soldier-officers assembled on a high festival and state occasion; but presently the majesty of kingship took him, and he cried out at his son and made him tremble. ITien he called to the guards standing before him and commanded, "Seize him!" So they came forward and laid hands on him and, binding him, brought him before his sire, who bade them pinion his elbows behind his back and in this guise make him stand before the presence. And the prince bowed down his head for fear and apprehension, and his brow and face were beaded and spangled with sweat; and shame and confusion troubled him sorely. Thereupon his father abused him and reviled him and cried, "Woe to thee, thou son of adultery and nursling of abomination! How durst thou answer me in this wise before my captains and soldiers'? But hitherto none hath chastised thee. Knowest thou not that this deed thou hast done were a disgrace to him had it been done by the meanest of my subjects?" And the king ordered his mamelukes to loose his elbow-bonds and imprison him in one of the bastions of the citadel. So they took the prince and thrust him into an old tower in which there was a dilapidated salon, and in its midst a ruined well, after having first swept it and cleansed its floor-rags and

DEPARTURE set therein a couch on which they laid a mattress, a leathern rug, and a cushion. And then they brought a great lantern and a wax candle; for that place was dark, even by day. And lastly the mamelukes led Kamar al-Zaman thither, and stationed a eunuch at the door. And when all this was done, the prince threw himself on the couch, sad-spirited, and heavyhearted, blaming himself and repenting of his injurious conduct to his father. Meanwhile in the distant empire of China, the daughter of King Ghazur, lord of the Islands and the Seas and the Seven Palaces, was in like case. When her beauty had become known and her name and fame been bruited abroad in the neighboring countries, all the kings had sent to her father to demand her of him in marriage, and he had consulted her on the matter, but she had disliked the very word wedlock. "O my father," she had answered, "I have no mind to marry; no, not at all; for I am a sovereign lady and a queen suzerain ruling over men, and I have no desire for a man who shall rule over me." And the more suits she refused, the more her suitors' eagerness increased and all the royalties of the inner Islands of China sent presents and rarities to her father with letters asking her in marriage. So he pressed her again and again with advice on the matter of espousals; but she ever opposed to him refusals, till at last she turned upon him angrily and cried: "O my father, if thou name matrimony to me once more, I will go into my chamber and take a sword and, fixing its hilt on the ground, will set its point to my waist; then will I press upon it, till it come forth from my back, and so slay myself?' Now when the king heard these words, the light became darkness in his sight and his heart burned for her as with a flame of fire, because he feared lest she should kill herself; and he was filled with perplexity concerning her affair and the kings her suitors. So he said to her: "If thou be determined not to marry and there be no help for it: abstain from going and coming in and out." Then he placed her in a house and shut her up in a chamber, appointing ten old women as duennas to guard her, and forbade her to go forth to the Seven Palaces. Moreover, he made it appear that he was incensed against her, and sent letters

SUPERNATURA to all the kings, giving them to know that she had been stricken with madness by the Jinn.2" With the hero and the heroine both following the negative way, and between them the continent of Asia, it will require a miracle to consummate the union of this eternally predestined pair. Whence can such a power come to break the life-negating spell and dissolve the wrath of the two childhood fathers? The reply to this question would remain the same throughout the mythologies of the world. For, as is written so frequently in the sacred pages of the Koran: "Well able is Allah to save." The sole problem is what the machinery of the miracle is to be. And that is a secret to be opened only in the following stages of this Arabian Nights' entertainment.

•

3

•

Supernatural Aid

For those who have not refused the call, the first encounter of the hero-journey is with a protective figure (often a little old crone or old man) who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass. An East African tribe, for example, the Wachaga of Tanganyika, tell of a very poor man named Kyazimba, who set out in desperation for the land where the sun rises. And he had traveled long and grown tired, and was simply standing, looking hopelessly in the direction of his search, when he heard someone approaching from behind. He turned and perceived a decrepit little woman. She came up and wished to know his business. When he had told her, she wrapped her garment around him, and, soaring from the earth, transported him to the zenith, where the sun pauses in the middle of the day. Then with a mighty din a great company of men came from eastward to that place, and in the u Abridged from Burton, op. cit,, Vol. Ill, pp. 213-228.

DEPARTURE

SUPERNATURAL AID

midst of them was a brilliant chieftain, who, when he had arrived, slaughtered an ox and sat down to feast with his retainers. The old woman asked his help for Kyazimba. The chieftain blessed the man and sent him home. And it is recorded that he lived in prosperity ever after.2' Among the American Indians of the Southwest the favorite personage in this benignant role is Spider Woman—a grandmotherly little dame who lives underground. The Twin War Gods of the Navaho on the way to the house of their father, the Sun, had hardly departed from their home, following a holy trail, when they came upon this wonderful little figure: "The boys traveled rapidly in the holy trail, and soon after sunrise, near Dsilnaotil, saw smoke arising from the ground. They went to the place where the smoke rose, and they found it came from the smoke hole of a subterranean chamber. A ladder, black from smoke, projected through the hole. Looking down into the chamber they saw an old woman, the Spider Woman, who glanced up at them and said: 'Welcome, children. Enter. Who are you, and whence do you come together walking?1 They made no answer, but descended the ladder. When they reached the floor she again spoke to them, asking: 'Wrhither do you two go walking together?1 'Nowhere in particular,' they answered; 'we came here because we had nowhere else to go.' She asked this question four times, and each time she received a similar answer. Then she said: 'Perhaps you would seek your father?' 'Yes,' they answered, 'if we only knew the way to his dwelling.' 'Ah!' said the woman, 'it is a long and dangerous way to the house of your father, the Sun. There are many monsters dwelling between here and there, and perhaps, when you get there, your father may not be glad to see you, and may punish you for coming. You must pass four places of danger—the rocks that crush the traveler, the reeds that cut him to pieces, the cane cactuses that tear him to pieces, and the boiling sands that overwhelm him. But I shall give you something to subdue your enemies and preserve your lives.' She gave them a charm called 'feather of the alien
>7

gods,' which consisted of a hoop with two life-feathers (feathers plucked from a living eagle) attached, and another life-feather to preserve their existence. She taught them also this magic formula, which, if repeated to their enemies, would subdue their anger: 'Put your feet down with pollen. Put your hands down with pollen. Put your head down with pollen. Then your feet are pollen; your hands are pollen; your body is pollen; your mind is pollen; your voice is pollen. The trail is beautiful. Be still.'"2S The helpful crone and fairy godmother is a familiar feature of European fair)' lore; in Christian saints' legends the role is commonly played by the Virgin. The Virgin by her intercession can win the mercy of the Father. Spider Woman with her web can control the movements of the Sun. The hero who has come under the protection of the Cosmic Mother cannot be harmed. The thread of Ariadne brought Theseus safely through the adventure of the labyrinth. This is the guiding power that runs through the work of Dante in the female figures of Beatrice and the Virgin, and appears in Goethe's Faust successively as Gretchen, Helen of Troy, and the Virgin. "Thou art the living fount of hope," prays Dante, at the end of his safe passage through the perils of the Three Worlds; "Lady, thou art so great and so availest, that whoso would have grace, and has not recourse to thee, would have his desire fly without wings. Thy benignity not only succors him who asks, but oftentimes freely foreruns the asking. In thee mercy, in thee pity, in thee magnificence, in thee whatever of goodness is in any creature, are united."29 aB Washington Matthews, Navaho Legends (Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, Vol. V, New York, 1897), p. 109. Pollen is a symbol of spiritual energy among the American Indians of the Southwest. It is used profusely in all ceremonials, both to drive evil away and to mark out the symbolical path of life. (For a discussion of the Navaho" symbolism of the adventure of the hero, see Jeff King, Maud Oakes, and Joseph Campbell, Where the Two Came to Their Father, A Navaho War Ceremonial, Bollingen Series T, and edn., Princeton University Press, 1969, pp. 33-49.) 25 Dante, "Paradiso," XXX11I, 12-21 (translation by Charles Eliot Norton, op. cit., Vol. Ill, p. 252; quoted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, publishers).

Braofl Gutmann, Volksbuch der Wadschagga (Leipzig, 1914), p. 144..

65

DEPARTURE

SUPERNATURAL AID

What such a figure represents is the benign, protecting power of destiny. The fantasy is a reassurance—a promise that the peace of Paradise, which was known first within the mother womb, is not to be lost; that it supports the present and stands in the future as well as in the past (is omega as well as alpha); that though omnipotence may seem to be endangered by the threshold passages and life awakenings, protective power is always and ever present within the sanctuary of the heart and even immanent within, or just behind, the unfamiliar features of the world. One has only to know and trust, and the ageless guardians will appear. Having responded to his own call, and continuing to follow courageously as the consequences unfold, the hero finds all the forces of the unconscious at his side. Mother Nature herself supports the mighty task. And in so far as the hero's act coincides with that for which his society itself is ready, he seems to ride on the great rhythm of the historical process. "I feel myself," said Napoleon at the opening of his Russian campaign, "driven towards an end that I do not know. As soon as I shall have reached it, as soon as I shall become unnecessary, an atom will suffice to shatter me. Till then, not all the forces of mankind can do anything against me.1"0 Not infrequently, the supernatural helper is masculine in form. In fairy lore it may be some little fellow of the wood, some wizard, hermit, shepherd, or smith, who appears, to supply the amulets and advice that the hero will require. The higher mythologies develop the role in the great figure of the guide, the teacher, the ferryman, the conductor of souls to the afterworld. In classical myth this is Hermes-Mercury; in Egyptian, usually
3 " See Oswald Spengter. The Decline of the Went, translated by Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1926-28), Vol. I, p. 144. "Supposing." mkls Spongier, "that Napoleon himself, as 'empirical person,' had fallen at Marengo—then that which he signified would have been actualized in some other form." The hero, who in this sense and to this degree has become depersonalized, incarnates, during the period of his epochal action, the dynamism of the culture process; "between himself as a fact and the other facts there is a harnioiu of mt:i;i physical Hi\ ilim" i /hid., p. 1 \2). I his corresponds Id r] llamas Otrlvle's idea of the Hero Kinii;, ;'is " \blenian (Oft Heroes, HeroWorship and The Heroic in History, Lecture VI).

Thoth (the ibis god, the baboon god); in Christian, the Holy Ghost.31 Goethe presents the masculine guide in Faust as Mephistopheles—and not infrequently the dangerous aspect of the "mercurial" figure is stressed; for he is the lurer of the innocent soul into realms of trial. In Dante's vision the part is played by Virgil, who yields to Beatrice at the threshold of Paradise. Protective and dangerous, motherly and fatherly at the same time, this supernatural principle of guardianship and direction unites in itself all the ambiguities of the unconscious—thus signifying the support of otir conscious personality by that other, larger system, but also the inscrutability of the guide that we are following, to the peril of all our rational ends.32 The hero to whom such a helper appears is typically one who has responded to the call. The call, in fact, was the first announcement of the approach of this initiatory priest. But even to those who apparently have hardened their hearts the supernatural guardian may appear; for, as we have seen: "Well able is Allah to save."
During Hellenistic times an nmalgamatton of Hermes and 1 both was effected in the figure of Hermes Trismegistus, "Hermes Thrice Greatest," who Was regarded as the patron and teacher of all the arts, and especially of alchemy. The "hermetically" scaled retort, in which were placed the mystical metals, was regarded as a realm apart—a special region of heightened forces comparable to the mythological realm; and therein the metals underwent strange metamorphoses and transmutations, symbolical of the transfigurations of the soul under the tutelage of the supernatural. Hermes was the master of the ancient mysteries of initiation, and represented that coming-down of divine wisdom into the world which is represented also in the incarnations ol divine saviors (see infra, pp. 342-345). (See C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, part III, "Religious Ideas in Alchemy." (Orig. 1936.) For the retort, setpar. 338. For Hermes Trismegistus, see par. 173 and index, s.v. ''- The following dream supplies a vivid example of the fusion of opposites in the unconscious: "I dreamed that 1 had gone into a street of brothels and to one of the girls. As I entered, she changed into a man, who was lying, half clothed, on a sofa. He said: 'It doesn't disturb you (that I am now a man)?' The man looked old, and he had white sideburns. He reminded me of a certain chief forester who was a good friend of my father." (Wilhelm Stekel, Die Sprache des Traumes, pp. 70-71.) "All dreams," Dr. Stekel observes, "have a bisexual tendency. Where the bisexuality cannot be perceived, it is hidden in the latent dream content" i ihid-, p. 71). 67

DEPARTURE And so it happened, as it were by chance, that in the ancient and deserted tower where Kamar al-Zaman, the Persian prince, lay sleeping, there was an old Roman well,33 and this was inhabited by a Jinniyah of the seed of Iblis the Accursed, by name Maymunah, daughter of Al-Dimiryat, a renowned king of the Jinn.34 And as Kamar al-Zaman continued sleeping till the first third of the night, Maymunah came up out of the Roman well and made for the firmament, thinking to listen by stealth to the converse of the angels; but when she reached the mouth of the well, and saw a light shining in the tower room, contrary to custom, she marveled, drew nigh, entered within the door, and beheld the couch spread, whereon was a human form with a wax candle burning at his head and the lantern at his feet. She folded her wings and stood by the bed, and, drawing back the coverlid, discovered Kamar al-Zaman's face. And she was motionless for a full hour in admiration and wonderment, "Blessed be Allah," she exclaimed when she recovered, "the best of Creators!" for she was of the true-believing Jinn. Then she promised herself that she would do no hurt to Kamar al-Zaman, and became concerned lest, resting in this desert place, he should be slain by one of her relatives, the Marids/ 5 ir> The well is symbolical of the unconscious. Compare that of the fairy story of the Frog King, supra, pp. 45^17. 14 Compare the frog of the fairy tale. In pre-Mohammedan Arabia the Jinn (singular: m. Jinni; / Jinniyah) were haunting-demons of the deserts and wilderness. Hairy and misformed, or else shaped as animals, ostriches, or serpents, they were very dangerous to unprotected persons. The Prophet Mohammed admitted "the existence of these heathen spirits (Koran, 37:158), and incorporated them in the Mohammedan system, which recognizes three created intelligences under Allah: Angels formed of light, Jinn of subtle fire, and Man of the dust of the earth. The Mohammedan Jinn have the power of putting on any form they please, but not grosser than the essence of fire and smoke, and they can thus make themselves visible to mortals. There are three orders of Jinn: flyers, walkers, and divers. Many are supposed to have accepted the True Faith, and these are regarded as good; the rest are bad. The latter dwell and work in close association with the Fallen Angels, whose chief is Iblis ("the Despairer"). 35 An Ifrit {Ifritah) is a powerful Jinni (Jinniyah). The Marids are a particularly powerful and dangerous (.-lass of Jinn.

SUPERNATURAL AID

Bending over him, she kissed him between the eyes, and presently drew back the sheet over his face; and after a while she spread her wings and, soaring into the air, flew upwards till she drew near to the lowest of the heavens. Now as chance or destiny would have it, the soaring Ifritah Maymunah suddenly heard in her neighborhood the noisy flapping of wings. Directing herself by the sound, she found it coming from an Ifrit called Dahnash. So she swooped down on him like a sparrow hawk, and when he was aware of her and knew her to be Maymunah, the daughter of the king of the Jinn, he was sore afraid, and his side muscles quivered, and he implored her to forbear. But she challenged him to declare whence he should be coming at this hour of the night. He replied that he was returning from the Islands of the Inland Sea in the parts of China, the realms of King Ghayur, Lord of the Islands and the Seas and the Seven Palaces. "There," said he, "I saw a daughter of his, than whom Allah hath made none fairer in her time." And he launched into great praise of the Princess Budur. "She hath a nose,11 said he, "like the edge of a burnished blade and cheeks like purple wine or anemones blood-red: her lips as coral and cornelian shine and the water of her mouth is sweeter than old wine; its taste would quench hell's fiery pain. Her tongue is moved by wit of high degree and ready repartee: her breast is seduction to all that see (glory be to Him Who fashioned it and finished it!); and joined thereto are two upper arms smooth and rounded; even as saith of her the poet Al-Walahan: She hath wrists which, did her bangles not contain. Would run from out her sleeves in silvern rain." The celebration of her beauty continued, and when Maymunah had heard it all she remained silent in astonishment. Dahnash resumed, and described the mighty king, her father, his treasures, and the Seven Palaces, as well as the history of the daughter's refusal to wed. "And I," said he, "O my lady, go to her every night and take my fill of feeding my sight on her face and I kiss her between the eyes: yet, of my love to her, I do her no 69

DEPARTURE hurt." He desired Maymunah to fly back with him to China and look on the beauty, loveliness, stature, and perfection of proportion of the princess. "And after, if thou wilt," said he, "chastise me or enslave me; for it is thine to bid and to forbid." Maymunah was indignant that anyone should presume to celebrate any creature in the world, after the glimpse she had just had of Kamar al-Zaman. "Faugh! Faugh!" she cried. She laughed at Dahnash and spat in his face. "Verily, this night I have seen a young man," said she, "whom if thou saw though but in a dream, thou wouldst be palsied with admiration and spittle would flow from thy mouth." And she described his case. Dahnash expressed his disbelief that anyone could be more handsome than the Princess Budur, and Maymunah commanded him to come down with her and look. "I hear and I obey," said Dahnash. And so they descended and alighted in the salon. Maymunah stationed Dahnash beside the bed and, putting out her hand, drew back the silken coverlet from Kamar al-Zaman's face, when it glittered and glistened and shimmered and shone like the rising sun. She gazed at him for a moment, then turning sharply round upon Dahnash said: "Look, O accursed, and be not the basest of madmen; I am a maid, yet my heart he hath waylaid." "By Allah, O my Lady, thou art excusable," declared Dahnash; "but there is yet another thing to be considered, and that is, that the estate female differeth from the male. By Allah's might, this thy beloved is the likest of all created things to my mistress in beauty and loveliness and grace and perfection; and it is as though they were both cast alike in the mold of seemlihead.1' The light became darkness in Maymunah's sight when she heard those words, and she dealt Dahnash with her wing so fierce a buffet on the head as well-nigh made an end of him. "I conjure thee," she commanded, "by the light of my love's glorious countenance, go at once, O accursed, and bring hither thy mistress whom thou lovest so fondly and foolishly, and return in haste that we may lay the twain together and look at them both as they lie asleep side by side; so shall it appear to us which be the goodlier and more beautiful of the two."

T HK C R O S S I N G

OF T H F.

FIRST THRESHOLD

And so, incidentally to something going on in a zone of which he was entirely unconscious, the destiny of the life-reluctant Kamar al-Zaman began to fulfil itself, without the cooperation of his conscious will.36

The Crossing of the First Threshold

With the personifications of his destiny to guide and aid him, the hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the "threshold guardian" at the entrance to the zone of magnified power. Such custodians bound the world in the four directions — also up and down—standing for the limits c the hero's present sphere, or life horizon. Beyond them is dark less, the unknown, and danger; just as beyond the parental watch is danger to the infant and beyond the protection of his society danger to the member of the tribe. The usual person is more than content, he is even proud, to remain within the indicated bounds, and popular belief gives him every reason to fear so much as the first step into the unexplored. Thus the sailors of the bold vessels of Columbus, breaking the horizon of the medieval mind —sailing, as they thought, into the boundless ocean of immortal being that surrounds the cosmos, like an endless mythological serpent biting its taiF—had to be cozened and urged on like children, because of their fear of the fabled leviathans, mermaids, dragon kings, and other monsters of the deep. The folk mythologies populate with deceitful and dangerous presences every desert place outside the normal traffic of the village. For example, the Hottentots describe an ogre that has been occasionally encountered among the scrubs and dunes. Its eyes
! " Adapted from Burton, op. cit.. Vol. HI, pp. 223-230. ~" Compare the serpent of the dream, supra, p. 38.

DEPARTURE

THE CROSSING OF THE FIRST THRESHOLD

are set on its instep, so that to discover what is going on it has to get down on hands and knees, and hold up one foot. The eye then looks behind; otherwise it is gazing continually at the sky. This monster is a hunter of men, whom it tears to shreds with cruel teeth as long as fingers. The creature is said to hunt in packs.38 Another Hottentot apparition, the Hai-uri, progresses by leaping over clumps of scrub instead of going around them.39 A dangerous one-legged, one-armed, one-sided figure—the halfman—invisible if viewed from the offside, is encountered in many parts of the earth. In Central Africa it is declared that such a halfman says to the person who has encountered him: "Since you have met with me, let us fight together." If thrown, he will plead: "Do not kill me. I will show you lots of medicines"; and then the lucky person becomes a proficient doctor. But if the half-man (called Chiruwi, "a mysterious thing") wins, his victim dies.40 The regions of the unknown (desert, jungle, deep sea, alien land, etc.) are free fields for the projection of unconscious content. Incestuous libido and patricidal destrudo are thence reflected back against the individual and his society in forms suggesting threats of violence and fancied dangerous delight—not only as ogres but also as sirens of mysteriously seductive, nostalgic beauty.
Leonhard S. Schultze, Aus Namaland und Kalahari (Jena, 1907), p. 392. Ibid. pp. 404, 448. David Clement Scott, ,4 Cyclopaedic Dirtirmary of the Mimg'anja Language spoken in British Central Africa (Edinburgh, 1892), p. 97. Compare the following dream of a twelve-year-old boy: "One night I dreamt of a foot. I thought it was lying down on the floor and I, not expecting such a thing, fell over it. It seemed to be the same shape as my own foot. The foot suddenly jumped up and started running after me; I thought I jumped right through the window, ran round the yard out into the street, running along as fast as my legs would carry me. I thought I ran to Woolwich, and then it suddrill", caught :ii 1 ' 1 T \ . 1 i > I l l l - f ' L l v i ' I l l ' l l v l l , ; i l l f 1 ' \ \ r"i t i ' \ ~ t - ] ' " A \ t ? i l t l l C ' l ' S ^ I O l i I ' l l III O f \ f ' i ^ l ' l l '] mind, -^pint or sou! unH llnj idtj;i of the father or ot masculinity; and on the oilier hand between the notion of the body or of matter (materia-that which belongs to the mother) and the idea of the mother or of the feminine principle. The repression of the emotions and feelings

mother—young and beautiful—who was known to us, and even tasted, in the remotest past. Time sealed her away, yet she is dwelling still, like one who sleeps in timelessness, at the bottom of the timeless sea. The remembered image is not only benign, however; for the "bad" mother too —(1) the absent, unattainable mother, against whom aggressive fantasies are directed, and from whom a counteraggression is feared; (2) the hampering, forbidding, punishing mother; (3) the mother who would hold to herself the growing child trying to push away; and finally (4) the desired but forbidden mother (Oedipus complex) whose presence is a lure to dangerous desire (castration complex)—persists in the hidden land of the adult's infant recollection and is sometimes even the greater force. She is at the root of such unattainable great goddess figures as that of the chaste and terrible Diana—whose absolute ruin of the young sportsman Actaeon illustrates what a blast of fear is contained in such symbols of the mind's and body's blocked desire. Actaeon chanced to see the dangerous goddess at noon; that fateful moment when the sun breaks in its youthful, strong ascent, balances, and begins the mighty plunge to death. He had left his companions to rest, together with his blooded dogs, after a morning of running game, and without conscious purpose had gone wandering, straying from his familiar hunting groves and fields, exploring through the neighboring woods. He discovered a vale, thick grown with cypresses and pine. He penetrated curiously into its fastness. There was a grotto within in, watered by a gentle, purling spring and with a stream that widened to a grassy pool. This shaded nook was the resort of Diana, and at that moment she was bathing among her nymphs, absolutely naked. She had put aside her hunting spear, her quiver, her unstrung bow, as well as her sandals and her robe. And one of the nude nymphs had bound up her tresses into a knot; some of the others were pouring water from capacious urns. When the young, roving male broke into the pleasant haunt, a shriek of female terror went up, and all the bodies crowded about their mistress, trying to hide her from the profane eye.

103

INITIATION

THE M E E T I N G WITH THE GODDESS

also, in numerous religious traditions, a consciously controlled pedagogical utilization of this archetypal image for the purpose of the purging, balancing, and initiation of the mind into the nature of the visible world. In the Tantric books of medieval and modern India the abode of the goddess is called Mani-dvipa, "The Island of Jewels."32 Her couch-and-throne is there, in a grove of wish-fulfilling trees. The beaches of the isle are of golden sands. They are laved by the still waters of the ocean of the nectar of immortality. The goddess is red with the fire of life; the earth, the solar system,

relating To the mother [in our Judeo-Christian monotheism] has, in virtue of this association, produced a tendency to adopt an attitude of distract, C T O or hostility towards the human body, the Earth, and the whole material Uni with a corresponding tendency to exalt and overemphasize the spiritual elements, whether in man or in the general scheme of things. It seems very probable that a good many of the more pronounicdlv idealistic tendtwii's in philosophy may owe much of their attractiveness in many minds to a sublimation of this reaction against the mother, while the more dogmatic and narrow forms of materialism may perhaps in their turn represent a return of the repressed feelings originally connected with the mother" (ibid., p. 145, note 2).
; - The sacred writings (Shastras) of Hinduism are divided into four classes: (1) Shruti, which are regarded as direct divine revelation; these include the four Vedas (ancient books of psalms) and certain of the Upanishads (ancient books of philosophy); (2) Smriti, which include the traditional teachings of the orthodox SLI^I1^. caiK'iiK'L'.l instructions I or domestic ceiviiiiji:!..]!'., ;md ctruuri works of secular ami religious kiu ; {i') Purfinn. which aiv the Hindu mythological and epic works par excellence; these treat of cosmogonic, theological, astronomical, and physical knowledge; and (4) Tantra, texts describing techniques and rituals for the worship of deities, and for the attainment of supranormal power. Among the Tantras are a group of particularly important scriptures (called Agamas) which are supposed to have been revealed directly by the Universal" God Shiva and his Goddess Parvati. (They are termed, therefore, "The Fifth Veda.") These support a mystical tradition known specifically as "The Tantra. which hus exercised :i pLTv:i--;[\ . 75. 50 Ibid., p. 227. citing R. and C. Berndt, "A Preliminary Report of Field Work in the Ooldea Region, Western South Australia," Oceania, XII (1942), p. 323.

128

129

I N IT1AT1ON

ATONEMENT WITH THE FATHER Come, 0 Dithyramb™, Enter this my male womb.66 This cry of Zeus, the Thunder-hurler, to the child, his son, Dionysos, sounds the leitmotif of the Greek mysteries of the initiatory second birth. "And bull-voices roar thereto from somewhere out of the unseen, fearful semblances, and from a drum an image as it were of thunder underground is borne on the air heavy with dread.1"17 The word "Dithyrambos" itself, as an epithet of the killed and resurrected Dionysos, was understood by the Greeks to signify "him of the double door," him who had survived the awesome miracle of the second birth. And we know that the choral songs (dithyrambs) and dark, blood-reeking rites in celebration of the god—associated with the renewal of vegetation, the renewal of the moon, the renewal of the sun, the renewal of the soul, and solemnized at the season of the resurrection of the year god—represent the ritual beginnings of the Attic tragedy. Throughout the ancient world such myths and rites abounded: the deaths and resurrections of Tammuz, Adonis, Mithra, Virbius, Attis, and Osiris, and of their various animal representatives (goats and sheep, bulls, pigs, horses, fish, and birds) are known to every student of comparative, religion; the popular carnival games of the Whitsuntide Louts, Green Georges, John Barleycorns, and Kostrubonkos, Carrying-out -Winter, Bringingin-Summer, and Killing of the Christmas Wren, have continued the tradition, in a mood of frolic, into our contemporary calendar;''8 and through the Christian church (in the mythology of the Fall and Redemption, Crucifixion and Resurrection, the "second birth" of baptism, the initiatory blow on the cheek at
60 Euripides. The liacchae, 526 f. "7 Aeschylus, Frg. 57 (Nauck); cited by Jane Harrison (Themis, p. 61) in her s, oij ner discussion 'of the role of the bull-roarer in classical and Australian rites of initif ii ation. For an introduction to the subject of the bull-roarer, see Andrew Lang, Custom OIK! \l'ith I2IKI n-.Kri"! i-cliuon; I Guidon: L, hi M1 people. Much spoil can be made of selling the whole lot to Barbadoes, where slaves fetch good pnecs in rum ;inn£ur\ ^ind I have vanished" (Bayazid, as cited in The Legacy of Mam, T. W. Arnold and A. Guillaume, editors, Oxford Press, 1931, p. 216). 117 "I came forth from Bayazid-ness as a snake from its skin. Then 1 looked. I saw that lover, beloved, and love are one, lor in the world of unity all can he one" (Bayazki,/w. cit.). 149

INITIATION

APOTHEOSIS

desired and feared. All the gods, Bodhisattvas, and Buddhas have been subsumed in us, as in the halo of the mighty holder of the lotus of the world. "Come," therefore, "and let us return unto the Lord: for he hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up. After two days will he revive us: in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight. Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the Lord: his going forth is prepared as the morning; and he shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter and former rain unto the earth."118 This is the sense of the first wonder of the Bodhisattva: the androgynous character of the presence. Therewith the two apparently opposite mythological adventures come together: the Meeting with the Goddess, and the Atonement with the Father. For in the first the initiate learns that male and female are (as phrased in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad) "two halves of a split pea";liy whereas in the second, the Father is found to be antecedent to the division of sex: the pronoun "He" was a manner of speech, the myth of Sonship a guiding line to be erased. And in both cases it is found (or rather, recollected) that the hero himself is that which he had come to find. The second wonder to be noted in the Bodhisattva myth is its annihilation of the distinction between life and release-from-life— which is symbolized (as we have observed) in the Bodhisattva's renunciation of Nirvana. Briefly, Nirvana means "the Extinguishing, of the Threefold Fire of Desire, Hostility, and Delusion."120
118

As the reader will recall: in the legend of the Temptation under the Bo Tree (supra, pp. 31-32) the antagonist of the Future Buddha was Kama-Mara, literally "Desire —Hostility,1' or "Love and Death," the magician of Delusion. He was a personification of the Threefold Fire and of the difficulties of the last test, a final threshold guardian to be passed by the universal hero on his supreme adventure to Nirvana. Having subdued within himself to the critical point of the ultimate ember the Threefold Fire, which is the moving power of the universe, the Savior beheld reflected, as in a mirror all around him, the last projected fantasies of his primitive physical will to live like other human beings—the will to live according to the normal motives of desire and hostility, in a delusory ambient of phenomenal causes, ends, and means. He was assailed by the last fury of the disregarded flesh. And this was the moment on which all depended; for from one coal could arise again the whole conflagration. This greatly celebrated legend affords an excellent example of the close relationship maintained in the Orient between myth, psychology, and metaphysics. The vivid personifications prepare the intellect for the doctrine of the interdependence of the inner and the outer worlds. No doubt the reader has been struck by a certain resemblance of this ancient mythological doctrine of the dynamics of the psyche to the teachings of the modern Freudian school. According to the latter, the life-wish (eros or libido, corresponding to the Buddhist Kama, "desire") and the death-wish (thanatos or destrudo, which is identical with the Buddhist Mara, "hostility or death") are the two drives that not only move the individual from within but also animate for him the surrounding world.121 Moreover, the unconsciously grounded delusions from which desires and hostilities arise are in both systems dispelled by psychological analysis (Sanskrit: viveka) and illumination (Sanskrit: vidyd). Yet the aims of the two teachings-the traditional and the modern-are not exactly the same.
121 Sigmund Freud. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (translated by James Stvachey; Standard Edition, XVIII; London: The Hogarth Press, 1955). Set also Karl Menninger, Love against Hate, p. 262.

Hosea, 6: 1-3.

m

Brihadaranyaku. Upaniskad, 1. 4. 3. Cf. infra, p. 257.

"The verb nirva (Sanskrit) is, literally, 'to blow out,' not transitively, but as a fire ceases to draw. . . . Deprived of fuel, the fire of life is 'pacified,' i.e., ' jUi-m'hrd, \vlihkul Dictionary (I.(melon and Shanghai. 1898), p. 372.

lfi(1 Lao-tse, Tao Teh King, 16 (translation by Dwight Goddard, Laotzu'a Tao and Wu Wei; New York. 1919, p. 18). Compare pages 118-119, note 46, supra.

175

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and it was immediately gold; he took up a stone, it had turned to gold; an apple was a golden nugget in his hand. Ecstatic, he ordered prepared a magnificent feast to celebrate the miracle. But when he sat down and set his fingers to the roast, it was transmuted; at his lips the wine became liquid gold. And when his little daughter, whom he loved beyond anything on earth, came to console him in his misery, she became, the moment he embraced her, a pretty golden statue. The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization. As he crosses threshold after threshold, conquering dragon after dragon, the stature of the divinity that he summons to his highest wish increases, until it subsumes the cosmos. Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realization transcending all experiences of form—all symbolizations, all divinities: a realization of the ineluctable void. So it is that when Dante had taken the last step in his spiritual adventure, and came before the ultimate symbolic vision of the Triune God in the Celestial Rose, he had still one more illumination to experience, even beyond the forms of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. "Bernard," he writes, "made a sign to me, and smiled, that I should look upward; but I was already, of myself, such as he wished; for my sight, becoming pure, was entering more and more, through the radiance of the lofty Light which in Itself is true. Thenceforward my vision was greater than our speech, which yields to such a sight, and the memory yields to such excess."16' "There goes neither the eye, nor speech, nor the mind: we know It not; nor do we see how to teach one about It. Different It is from all that are known, and It is beyond the unknown as well."168
""'• "Paradiso," XXXIII, 49-57 (translation by Norton, op. cit., Vol. Ill, pp. 253-254, by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, publishers). 1M Kena Upanisfuut, 1:3 (translation by Swami Sharvananda; Sri Ramakrishna Math; Mylapore, Madras, 19.12). 176

This is the highest and ultimate crucifixion, not only of the hero, but of his god as well. Here the Son and the Father alike are annihilated —as personality-masks over the unnamed. For just as the figments of a dream derive from the life energy of one dreamer, representing only fluid splittings and complications of that single force, so do all the forms of all the worlds, whether terrestrial or divine, reflect the universal force of a single inscrutable mystery: the power that constructs the atom and controls the orbits of the stars. That font of life is the core of the individual, and within himself he will find it—if he can tear the coverings away. The pagan Germanic divinity Othin (Wotan) gave an eye to split the veil of light into the knowledge of this infinite dark, and then underwent for it the passion of a crucifixion: / ween that I hung on the ivindy tree, Hung therefor nights full nine; With the spear I was wounded, and offered I was To Othin, myself to myself, On the tree that none may ever know What root beneath it runs.169 The Buddha's victory beneath the Bo Tree is the classic Oriental example of this deed. With the sword of his mind he pierced the bubble of the universe—and it shattered into nought. The whole world of natural experience, as well as the continents, heavens, and hells of traditional religious belief, explodedtogether with their gods and demons. But the miracle of miracles was that though all exploded, all was nevertheless thereby renewed, revivified, and made glorious with the effulgence of true being. Indeed, the gods of the redeemed heavens raised their voices in harmonious acclaim of the man-hero who had penetrated beyond them to the void that was their life and source: "Flags and banners erected on the eastern rim of the world let their streamers fly to the western rim of the world; likewise
1

T

K

K

Emanations

• l • From Psychology to Metaphysics

IT is not difficult for the modern intellectual to concede that the symbolism of mythology has a psychological significance. Particularly after the work of the psychoanalysts, there can be little doubt, either that myths are of the nature of dream, or that dreams are symptomatic of the dynamics of the psyche. Sigmund Freud, Carl G. Jung, Wilhelm Stekel, Otto Rank, Karl Abraham, Geza Roheim, and many others have within the past few decades developed a vastly documented modern lore of dream and myth interpretation; and though the doctors differ among themselves, they are united into one great modern movement by a considerable body of common principles. With their discovery that the patterns and logic of fairy tale and myth correspond to those of dream, the long discredited chimeras of archaic man have returned dramatically to the foreground of modern consciousness. According to this view it appears that through the wonder tales— which pretend to describe the lives of the legendary heroes, the powers of the divinities of nature, the spirits of the dead, and the totem ancestors of the group—symbolic expression is given to the unconscious desires, fears, and tensions that underlie the conscious patterns of human behavior. Mythology, in other words, is psychology misread as biography; history, and cosmology. The modern psychologist can translate it back to its proper denotations and thus rescue for the contemporary world a rich
237

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and eloquent document of the profoundest depths of human character. Exhibited here, as in a fluoroscope, stand revealed the hidden processes of the enigma Homo sapiens—Occidental and Oriental, primitive and civilized, contemporary and archaic. The entire spectacle is before us. We have only to read it, study its constant patterns, analyze its variations, and therewith come to an understanding of the deep forces that have shaped man's destiny and must continue to determine both our private and our public lives. But if we are to grasp the full value of the materials, we must note that myths are not exactly comparable to dream. Their figures originate from the same sources—the unconscious wells of fantasy—and their grammar is the same, but they are not the spontaneous products of sleep. On the contrary, their patterns are consciously controlled. And their understood function is to serve as a powerful picture language for the communication of traditional wisdom. This is true already of the so-called primitive folk mythologies. The trance-susceptible shaman and the initiated antelope-priest are not unsophisticated in the wisdom of the world, nor unskilled in the principles of communication by analogy. The metaphors by which they live, and through which they operate, have been brooded upon, searched, and discussed for centuries —even millenniums; they have served whole societies, furthermore, as the mainstays of thought and life. The culture patterns have been shaped to them. The youth have been educated, and the aged rendered wise, through the study, experience, and understanding of their effective initiatory forms. For they actually touch and bring into play the vital energies of the whole human psyche. They link the unconscious to the fields of practical action, not irrationally, in the manner of a neurotic projection, but in such fashion as to permit a mature and sobering, practical comprehension of the fact-world to play back, as a stern control, into the realms of infantile wish and fear. And if this be true of the comparatively simple folk mythologies (the systems of myth and ritual by which the primitive hunting and fishing tribes support themselves), what may we say of such magnificent cosmic metaphors as those reflected in the great Homeric epics,
238

the Divine Comedy of Dante, the Book of Genesis, and the timeless temples of the Orient? Until the most recent decades, these were the support of all human life and the inspiration of philosophy, poetry, and the arts. Where the inherited symbols have been touched by a Lao-tse, Buddha, Zoroaster, Christ, or Mohammed— employed by a consummate master of the spirit as a vehicle of the profoundest moral and metaphysical instruction—obviously we are in the presence rather of immense consciousness than of darkness. And so, to grasp the full value of the mythological figures that have come down to us, we must understand that they are not only symptoms of the unconscious (as indeed are all human thoughts and acts) but also controlled and intended statements of certain spiritual principles, which have remained as constant throughout the course of human history as the form and nervous structure of the human physique itself. Briefly formulated, the universal doctrine teaches that all the visible structures of the world—all things and beings — are the effects of a ubiquitous power out of which they rise, which supports and fills them during the period of their manifestation, and back into which they must ultimately dissolve. This is the power known to science as energy, to the Melanesians as mana, to the Sioux Indians as ivakonda, the Hindus as sliakti, and the Christians as the power of God. Its manifestation in the psyche is termed, by the psychoanalysts, libido) And its manifestation in the cosmos is the structure and flux of the universe itself. The apprehension of the source of this undifferentiated yet everywhere particularized substratum of being is rendered frustrate by the very organs through which the apprehension must be accomplished. The forms of sensibility and the categories of human thought,2 which are themselves manifestations of this power,3 so confine the mind that it is normally impossible not
1 Cf. C. G. Jung, "On Psychic Energy" (orig. 1928; Collected Works, vol. 8), entitled in its earliest draft "The Theory of the Libido." - See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. 3 Sanskrit: mdya-sakti.

239

EMANATIONS only to see, but even to conceive, beyond the colorful, fluid, infinitely various and bewildering phenomenal spectacle. The function of ritual and myth is to make possible, and then to facilitate, the jump—by analogy. Forms and conceptions that the mind and its senses can comprehend are presented and arranged in such a way as to suggest a truth or openness beyond. And then, the conditions for meditation having been provided, the individual is left alone. Myth is but the penultimate; the ultimate is openness—that void, or being, beyond the categories4—into which the mind must plunge alone and be dissolved. Therefore, God and the gods are only convenient means—themselves of the nature of the world of names and forms, though eloquent of, and ultimately conducive to, the ineffable. They are mere symbols to move and awaken the mind, and to call it past themselves.5 Heaven, hell, the mythological age, Olympus and all the other habitations of the gods, are interpreted by psychoanalysis as symbols of the unconscious. The key to the modern systems of psychological interpretation therefore is this: the metaphysical realm = the unconscious. Correspondingly, the key to open the door the other way is the same equation in reverse: the unconscious = the metaphysical realm. "For," as Jesus states it, "behold, the kingdom of God is within you."6 Indeed, the lapse of superconsciousness into the state of unconsciousness is precisely the meaning of the Biblical image of the Fall. The constriction of consciousness, to which we owe the fact that we see not the
* Beyond the categories, and therefore not denned by either of the pair of opposites called "void" and "being.'1 Such terms are only clues to the transcendency. This recognition of the secondary nature of the personality of whatever deity is worshiped is characteristic of most of the traditions of the world (see, for example, supra, p. 164, note 154). In Christianity, Mohammedanism, and Judaism, however, the personality of the divinity is taught to be final—which makes it comparatively difficult for the members of these communions to understand how one may go beyond the limitations of their own anthropomorphic divinity. The result has been, on the one hand, a general obfuscation of the symbols, and on the other, a god-ridden bigotry such as is unmatched elsewhere in the history of religion. For a discussion of the possible origin of this aberration, see Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (translated by James Strachey; Standard Edn., XXIII, 1964). (Orig. 1939.) [i Luke, 17:21. 240

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source of the universal power but only the phenomenal forms reflected from that power, turns superconsciousness into unconsciousness and, at the same instant and by the same token, creates the world. Redemption consists in the return to superconsciousness and therewith the dissolution of the world. This is the great theme and formula of the cosmogonic cycle, the mythical image of the world's coming to manifestation and subsequent return into the nonmanifest condition. Equally, the birth, life, and death of the individual may be regarded as a descent into unconsciousness and return. The hero is the one who, while still alive, knows and represents the claims of the superconsciousness which throughout creation is more or less unconscious. The adventure of the hero represents the moment in his life when he achieved illumination—the nuclear moment when, while still alive, he found and opened the road to the light beyond the dark walls of our living death. And so it is that the cosmic symbols are presented in a spirit of thought-bewildering sublime paradox. The kingdom of God is within, yet without, also; God, however, is but a convenient means to wake the sleeping princess, the soul. Life is her sleep, death the awakening. The hero, the waker of his own soul, is himself but the convenient means of his own dissolution. God, the waker of the soul, is therewith his own immediate death. Perhaps the most eloquent possible symbol of this mystery is that of the god crucified, the god offered, "himself to himself.'" Read in one direction, the meaning is the passage of the phenomenal hero into superconsciousness: the body with its five senses—like that of Prince Five-weapons stuck to Sticky-hair— is left hanging to the cross of the knowledge of life and death, pinned in five places (the two hands, the two feet, and the head crowned with thorns).8 But also, God has descended voluntarily and taken upon himself this phenomenal agony. God assumes the life of man and man releases the God within himself at the mid-point of the cross-arms of the same "coincidence of
8

' Supra, p. 176. Supra, pp. 79-80. 241

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opposites," ' the same sun door through which God descends and Man ascends—each as the other's food.1" The modern student may, of course, study these symbols as he will, either as a symptom of others1 ignorance, or as a sign to him of his own, either in terms of a reduction of metaphysics to psychology, or vice versa. The traditional way was to meditate on the symbols in both senses. In any case, they are telling metaphors of the destiny of man, man's hope, man's faith, and man's dark mystery.

1

The Universal Round
As the consciousness of the individual rests on a sea of night into which it descends in slumber and out of which it mysteriously wakes, so, in the imagery of myth, the universe is precipitated out of, and reposes upon, a timelessness back into which it again dissolves. And as the mental and physical health of the individual depends on an orderly flow of vital forces into the field of waking day from the unconscious dark, so again in myth, the continuance of the cosmic order is assured only by a controlled flow of power from the source. The gods are symbolic personifications of the laws governing this flow. The gods come into existence with the dawn of the world and dissolve with the twilight. They are not eternal in the sense that the night is eternal. Only from the shorter span of human existence does the round of a cosmogonic eon seem to endure. The cosmogonic cycle is normally represented as repeating itself, world without end. During each great round, lesser dissolutions are commonly included, as the cycle of sleep and waking
9

revolves throughout a lifetime. According to an Aztec version, each of the four elements—water, earth, air, and fire—terminates a period of the world: the eon of the waters ended in deluge, that of the earth with an earthquake, that of air with a wind, and the present eon will be destroyed by flame." According to the Stoic doctrine of the cyclic conflagration, all souls are resolved into the world soul or primal fire. When this universal dissolution is concluded, the formation of a new universe begins (Cicero's renovatio), and all things repeat themselves, every divinity, every person, playing again his former part. Seneca gave a description of this destruction in his "De Consolatione ad Marciam," and appears to have looked forward to living again in the cycle to come.1"2 A magnificent vision of the cosmogonic round is presented in the mythology of the Jains. The most recent prophet and savior of this very ancient Indian sect was Mahavira, a contemporary of the Buddha (sixth century B.C.). His parents were already followers of a much earlier Jaina savior-prophet, Parshvanatha, who is represented with snakes springing from his shoulders and is reputed to have flourished 872-772 B.C. Centuries before Parshvanatha, there lived and died the Jaina savior Neminatha, declared to have been a cousin of the beloved Hindu incarnation, Krishna. And before him, again, were exactly twenty-one others, going all the way back to Rishabhanatha, who existed in an earlier age of the world, when men and women were always born in wedded couples, were two miles tall, and lived for a period of countless years. Rishabhanatha instructed the people in the seventy-two sciences (writing, arithmetic, reading of omens, etc.), the sixty-four accomplishments of women (cooking, sewing, etc.), and the one hundred arts (pottery, weaving, painting, smithing, barbering, etc.); also, he introduced them to politics and established a kingdom.
1 Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Historia de la Nation Chichimeca (1608), Capitulo I (published in Lord Kingsborough's Antiquities of Mexico; London, 1830-48, Vol. IX, p. 205; also by Alfredo Chavero, Obras Historicas de Alva Ixtlilxochitl; Mexico, 1891-92, Vol. II, pp. 21-22). 13 Hastings' Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. V, p. 375.

Supra, p. 81. "' Supra, pp. 38-39.

242

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Before his day, such innovations would have been superfluous; for the people of the preceding period—who were four miles tall, with one hundred and twenty-eight ribs, enjoying a life span of two periods of countless years—were supplied in all their needs by ten "wish-fulfilling trees" (kalpa vriksha), which gave sweet fruits, leaves that were shaped like pots and pans, leaves that sweetly sang, leaves that gave forth light at night, flowers delightful to see and to smell, food perfect both to sight and to taste, leaves that might serve as jewelry, and bark providing beautiful clothes. One of the trees was like a many-storied palace in which to live; another shed a gentle radiance, like that of many little lamps. The earth was sweet as sugar; the ocean as delicious as wine. And then again, before this happy age, there had been a period happier still—precisely twice as happy—when men and women had been eight miles tall, possessing each two hundred and fifty-six ribs. When those superlative people died, they passed directly to the world of the gods, without ever having heard of religion, for their natural virtue was as perfect as their beauty. The Jains conceive of time as an endless round. Time is pictured as a wheel with twelve spokes, or ages, classified in two sets of six. The first set is called the "descending" series (avasarpini), and begins with the age of the superlative giantcouples. That paradisiac period endures for ten millions of ten millions of one hundred millions of one hundred million periods of countless years, and then yields slowly to the only half as blissful period when men and women are only four miles tall. In the third period—that of Rishabhanatha, first of the twenty-four world saviors—happiness is mixed with a little sorrow, and virtue with a little vice. At the conclusion of this period, men and women are no longer born together in couples to live together as man and wife. During the fourth period, the gradual deterioration of the world and its inhabitants steadily continues. The life span and stature of man slowly diminish. Twenty-three world saviors are born; each restating the eternal doctrine of the Jains in terms appropriate to the conditions of his time. Three years, eight and
244

one-half months after the death of the last of the saviors and prophets, Mahavira, this period comes to an end. Our own age, the fifth of the descending series, began in 522 B.C. and will last for twenty-one thousand years. No Jaina savior will be born during this time, and the eternal religion of the Jains will gradually disappear. It is a period of unmitigated and gradually intensifying evil. The tallest human beings are only seven cubits tall, and the longest life span no more than one hundred and twenty-five years. People have only sixteen ribs. They are selfish, unjust, violent, lustful, proud, and avaricious. But in the sixth of the descending ages, the state of man and his world will be still more horrible. The longest life will be only twenty years; one cubit will be the greatest stature and eight ribs the meagre allotment. The days will be hot, the nights cold, disease will be rampant and chastity nonexistent. Tempests will sweep over the earth, and toward the conclusion of the period these will increase. In the end all life, human and animal, and all the vegetable seeds, will be forced to seek shelter in the Ganges, in miserable caves, and in the sea. The descending series will terminate and the "ascending" series (utsarpini) begin, when the tempest and desolation will have reached the point of the unendurable. For seven days then it will rain, and seven different kinds of rain will fall; the soil will be refreshed, and the seeds will begin to grow. Out of their caves the horrible dwarf-creatures of the arid, bitter earth will venture; and very gradually there will be perceptible a slight improvement in their morals, health, beauty, and stature; until presently they will be living in a world such as the one we know today. And then a savior will be born, named Padmanatha, to announce again the eternal religion of the Jains; the stature of mankind will approach again the superlative, the beauty of man will surpass the splendor of the sun. At last, the earth will sweeten and the waters turn to wine, the wish-fulfilling trees will yield their bounty of delights to a blissful population of perfectly wedded twins; and the happiness of this community again will be doubled, and the wheel, through ten millions of ten millions of one hundred millions of one hundred million periods of 245

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countless years, will approach the point of beginning the downward revolution, which again will lead to the extinction of the eternal religion and the gradually increasing noise of unwholesome merrymaking, warfare, and pestilential winds.13 This ever-revolving, twelve-spoked wheel of time of the .Jains is a counterpart of the cycle of four ages of the Hindus: the first age a long period of perfect bliss, beauty, and perfection, lasting 4800 divine years;14 the second of somewhat lesser virtue, lasting 3600 divine years; the third of equally intermingled virtue and vice, lasting 2400 divine years; and the last, our own, of steadily increasing evil, lasting 1200 divine years, or 432,000 years according to human calculation. But at the termination of the present period, instead of beginning again immediately to improve (as in the cycle described by the Jains), all is first to be annihilated in a cataclysm of lire and Hood, and thereby reduced to the primordial state of the original, timeless ocean, to remain for a period equal to that of the whole length of the four ages. The world's great ages then begin anew. A basic conception of Oriental philosophy is understood to be rendered in this picture-form. Whether the myth was originally an illustration of the philosophical formula, or the latter a distillation out of the myth, it is today impossible to say. Certainly the myth goes back to remote ages, but so too does philosophy. Who is to know what thoughts lay in the minds of the old sages who developed and treasured the myth and handed it on? Very often, during the analysis and penetration of the secrets of archaic symbol, one can only feel that our generally accepted notion of the history of philosophy is founded on a completely false assumption, namely that abstract and metaphysical thought begins where it first appears in our extant records. The philosophical formula illustrated by the cosmogonic cycle is that of the circulation of consciousness through the three planes of being. The first plane is that of waking experience: cognitive of
15 See Mrs. Sinclair Stevenson, The Heart of Jainism (Oxford University Press. 1915), pp. 272-278. 11 A divine year is equal to 360 human years. Cf. supra, p. 207.

the hard, gross, facts of an outer universe, illuminated by the light of the sun, and common to all. The second plane is that of dream experience: cognitive of the fluid, subtle, forms of a private interior world, self-luminous and of one substance with the dreamer. The third plane is that of deep sleep: dreamless, profoundly blissful. In the first are encountered the instructive experiences of life; in the second these are digested, assimilated to the inner forces of the dreamer; while in the third all is enjoyed and known unconsciously, in the "space within the heart,11 the room of the inner controller, the source and end of all.1" The cosmogonic cycle is to be understood as the passage of universal consciousness from the deep sleep zone of the unmanifest, through dream, to the full day of waking; then back again through dream to the timeless dark. As in the actual experience of every living being, so in the grandiose figure of the living cosmos: in the abyss of sleep the energies are refreshed, in the work of the day they are exhausted; the life of the universe runs down and must be renewed.

The cosmogonic cycle pulses forth into manifestation and back into nonmanifestation amidst a silence of the unknown. The Hindus represent this mystery in the holy syllable AUM. Here the sound A represents waking consciousness, U dream consciousness, M deep sleep. The silence surrounding the syllable is the unknown: it is called simply "The Fourth."111 The syllable itself is God as creator-preserver-destroyer, but the silence is God
See Mandukya Upanishad, 3-6. Mandukya Upanishad, 8-12. Since in Sanskrit a and u coalesce in o, the sacred syllable is pronounced and written "nm." See the prayers, pp. 141 and 218, note 31, supra. ln a

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Eternal, absolutely uninvolved in all the opening-and-closings of the round. It is unseen, unrelated, inconceivable, un inferable, unimaginable, indescribable. It is the essence of the one self-cognition common to all states of consciousness. All phenomena cease in it. It is peace, it is bliss, it is nonduality}' Myth remains, necessarily, within the cycle, but represents this cycle as surrounded and permeated by the silence. Myth is the revelation of a plenum of silence within and around every atom of existence. Myth is a directing of the mind and heart, by means of profoundly informed figurations, to that ultimate mystery which fills and surrounds all existences. Even in the most comical and apparently frivolous of its moments, mythology is directing the mind to this unmanifest which is just beyond the eye. "The Aged of the Aged, the Unknown of the Unknown, has a form and yet has no form," we read in a cabalistic text of the medieval Hebrews. "He has a form whereby the universe is preserved, and yet has no form, because he cannot be comprehended."18 This Aged of the Aged is represented as a face in

profile: always in profile, because the hidden side can never be known. This is called "The Great Face," Makroprosopos; from the strands of its white beard the entire world proceeds. "That beard, the truth of all truths, proceedeth from the place of the ears, and descendeth around the mouth of the Holy One; and descendeth and ascendeth, covering the cheeks which are called the places of copious fragrance; it is white with ornament: and it descendeth in the equilibrium of balanced power, and furnisheth a covering even unto the midst of the breast. That is the beard of adornment, true and perfect, from which flow down thirteen fountains, scattering the most precious balm of splendor. This is disposed in thirteen forms. . . . And certain dispositions are found in the universe, according to those thirteen dispositions which depend from that venerable beard, and they are opened out into the thirteen gates of mercies."19 The white beard of Makroprosopos descends over another head, "The Little Face," Mikroprosopos, represented full face and with a beard of black. And whereas the eye of The Great Face is without lid and never shuts, the eyes of The Little Face open and close in a slow rhythm of universal destiny. This is the opening and closing of the cosmogonic round. The Little Face is named "GOD," the Great Face "I AM." and finally incorporated cryptically in the first four books of the Pentateuch, from which it can be extracted by a proper understanding and manipulation of the mystical number-values of the Hebrew alphabet. This lore and the techniques for rediscovering and utilizing it constitute the cabala. It is said that the teachings of the cabala (qabbalah, "received or traditional lore") were first entrusted by God himself to a special group of angels in Paradise. After Man had been expelled from the Garden, some of these angels communicated the lessons to Adam, thinking to help him back to felicity thereby. From Adam the teaching passed to Noah, and from Noah to Abraham. Abraham let some of it slip from him while he was in Egypt, and that is why this sublime wisdom can now be found in reduced form in the myiihs and philosophies of the gentiles. Moses first studied it with the priests of Egypt, but the tradition was refreshed in him by the special instructions of his angels. 19 Ha idra rabba d(lr^s* 195-97, 199 ambrosia, 163 Christianity, United States amorfuti, 109 Anaa, Tuamotu Islands, 255-56 (PaioTe's creation chart), 261 Ananda, disciple of Buddha, 334-36 Andaman Islands, 75-76 Anderson, Johannes C, 251n.22 androgynous gods, xvii (PI. X), 140-12, 150, 156-58 (Bodhisattva) Ange", Marie (hermaphrodite), 142n.98 Angkor, see Cambodia Ani, Egyptian scribe, 344n.~ Anthony, St., temptation of, 115 anthropology, 361 Amibis, Egyptian god, xiv (fig. 18) VnuniKiM. SunuTi^in judges of underworld, 99 Apache Indians, 156, 261n.42, 323 Aphrodite, 141,198; see also Venus Apocrypha: Gospel of Eve, 37; Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, 286n.ll Apollo (Phoebus), 56-57 (myth of Daphne), 75, 122-25 (myth of Phaethon) Apollonios of Rhodes, 19On.8

Apuat, Kgyptiar. god, xiv (fig. 18) Apuleius, 89n.l Aquinas, St. Thomas, 3, 85n.59, 219, 250,327-28 (death) Arabia, South, 196 "Arabian Nights," see Kamar al-Zaman, tale of Aranda tribe of Australia, I8n.l9 Arapaho Indians, porcupine myth of, 49, 110 archaeology and mythology, 4 "archetypal images" (Jung), 16-18 Ardhanarisha, man iff! station of Shiva. 142 Ares, (Mars), 75 Argentina, xvii (PI. VIII) Ariadne, 21-23, 65 Aristotle, 24 Arizona, Navahos of, 356 Arjuna, Prince, Hindu hero, 214-17, 221 Arnold, T. W., 198n.l48 Arthurian cycle, 48^-9 (King Arthur), 184n.3, 305n.l4 artist and neurotic, Rank's view of, 59n.25 artist-scientist, Daedalus as, 23 Arunta tribe of Australia, 127-28 asceticism, 357 Ash, World (Yggdrasil, in Eddas), 163, 218*1.31,347 Ashur-nasir-apal II, Assyrian king, xviii (PL XIII), xix (PL XXI) Ashvaghosha, Buddhist poet, 153n.l24 Asia Minor, see Phiygia Assumption of the Virgin Mary, Feast of the, 110 Assyria, xviii (PI. XIII), xx (PI. XXI), 81n.Sl, 99n.26,172n.l59 Astarte, Phoenician goddess, 198 astrology, 361 astronomy, 361 Athena, xiii (fig. 12) Atkinson, Charles Francis (tr.), 59n.25, 66n.30 Atkinson, James (tr.), 321n.29

atonement with the father, hero's, 116-38 tt't. 273-78, 294, 309, 316n.26 I 'ajrucchedika, Buddhist text, 139B.85,152n.l22 Vajra-Dhara, Tibetan Buddha. Sln.Sl Valhalla, 344 vanGennep,A.,9n.l0 Vedantasara of Sadananda, Hindu text. 252n.24 Vedas, Hindu texts, 102n.32 (place in canon), 2l8n.32, 218, 321-22n.29, 358 Venus (goddess), 89-90, 198; see also Aphrodite Venus (planet), identified with Cosmic Woman, 278 Vikings, 265n.48, 344-45; see also Eddas Viracocha, pre-Inca deity, xvii (PI. VIII), 133, 134, 168, 220, 222 Virbius, Roman deity, 131 Virgil, 29n.36; see also Aeneas Virgil (Dante's), 20n.25. 67 virgin birth. 273-88 Virgin Mary, 6 (Madonna), 65 (as helper), 110 (Feast of the Assumption), 134 (in Bethlehem), 283-84 (conceiving of Holy Ghost) Vishnu, 165-67,180-82, 214-17; see also Krishna •uiveka ("discrimination"), HinduBuddhist concept, Ifi, 151 Wachaga tribe of Tanganyika, 63, 133 Wahungwe Makoni tribe of Southern Rhodesia, 278-82

"Wall of Paradise," Christian concept, 82 Wandering Jew, 58,220 war, modern, 144-47, 357-58 Warner, W. Lloyd, 127n.55 Warren, Henry Clarke (tr.), 32n.39, 53n.9,178n.l7O, 336n.43 "Water Grandfather" in Russian folklore, 73-74 Water Jar boy, Pueblo myth of, 299, 302-3, 317-18, 331 Weapon of Knowledge, in Buddhist myth of Prince Five-weapons, 80 well of fire, in Irish legend of Tubber Tintye, 100-101 Welsh elements, 182-84, 222-25 (Taliesin legend); 184n.3, 305n.l4 (explanation of Welsh mythology) Werner, E. T. C. 156n,128 whale's belly, 83-87; 193n.ll, 228, 230n.3 (Eskimo legend of Raven); 295 White, John, 186n.5 White Youth, Yakut myth of, 307-9, 326 folklore, 73 ' Wilhelm, Richard (tr.), 253n.26 Windisch, F., 306-8 im.15-18; 333n.4O wine, as Christian symbol, 119n.46 Wissler, Clark, 314n.22 wolf, 84, 196 (Red Ridinghood); 345 (Fenris) woman, 106 (symbolism in hero's adventure), 100-110 (as goddess), 111-16 (as temptress); 219, 273-88 (Cosmic Woman); 314-16 (as hero's prize); see also womb image, 83-87. 275-90 Wood, Clement, 5nl, 7n.7, 8n.8, 126n.53 Woodroffe, Sir John, 167n.l54 Word made Flesh, Christian concept, 141-42, 158, 213-14

World Axis, Navel, Savior, Tree, Umbrella, Womb, seemder world community, 144-16, 357 Wotan, Teutonic god, 38, 42n.S7, 57, 163,177, 220, 265n.48, 346 yab-yum, Buddhist concept, 157, 158n.l35 Yahweh, god of Hebrews, 134, 164, 168; see also Jehovah Yakut tribe of Siberia, 307-9 Yang and Yin, Taoist concept, 140, 158n.l35 Yggdrasil, see Ash, World Ymir, Eddie primal being, 262-63 yoga, Hindu discipline, 59,188, 256, 355 Yonibaland, Nigeria, xvi (PI. Ill), 13, 41-42, 133n.73

Young, Hugh Hampton, 141n.88, 142im.95 and 98 Yucatan, 4; see also Maya Zarathustra (Nietzsche's), 358 Zen Buddhism, 156n.l29 Zeus, 12, 81n.51, 84,131,134,168, 199n.l6, 259n.38, 301; see also Jovi Zimbabwe, South African ruins, 2K4n.9 Zimmer, Hdnrich, 95n.21, 104n.32, 118n.46, 142n.96,157n.l32, 167n.l52,182.2, 258n.37 Zohar, Hebrew cabalistic text, 248-49n.lH, 258 Zoroaster, 237; 319, 321n.29 (Persian religion of) Zulus of South Africa, 83-84 Zuui Indians, 1:39