Figure 20. The Return of Jason (red-figure kalyx, Etruscan, Italy, c. 470 b.c.)
* * *
Footnotes
* See Freud: castration complex.
* The serpent (in mythology a symbol of the terrestrial waters) corresponds precisely to Daphne’s father, the river Peneus.
* 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.
* The well is symbolical of the unconscious. Compare that of the fairy story of the Frog King, pp. 41–42.
* An Ifrit (Ifritah) is a powerful Jinni (Jinniyah). The Marids are a particularly powerful and dangerous class of Jinn.
* In Alexandrian times Pan was identified with the ithyphallic Egyptian divinity Min, who was, among other things, the guardian of desert roads.
* Compare Dionysos, the great Thracian counterpart of Pan.
* The watchman symbolizes, according to Wilhelm Stekel, “consciousness, or, if one prefers, the aggregate of all the morality and restrictions present in consciousness. Freud,” continues Dr. Stekel, “would describe the watchman as the ‘superego.’ But he is really only an ‘interego.’ Consciousness prevents the breaking through of dangerous wishes and immoral actions. This is the sense in which watchmen, police officials and officers in dreams are in general to be interpreted” (Wilhelm Stekel, Fortschritte und Technik der Traumdeutung [Wien-Leipzig-Bern: Verlag für Medizin, Weidmann und Cie., 1935], pp. 37–38).
* An amphibious sea snake marked with bands of dark and light color, always more or less dreaded whenever it is seen.
* It has been pointed out that this adventure of Prince Five-weapons is the earliest known example of the celebrated and well-nigh universal tar-baby story of popular folklore. (See Aurelio M. Espinosa: “Notes on the Origin and History of the Tar-Baby Story,” Journal of American Folklore, 43 [1930]: 129–209; “A New Classification of the Fundamental Elements of the Tar-Baby Story on the Basis of Two Hundred and Sixty-Seven Versions,” Journal of American Folklore, 56 [1943]: 31–37; and Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, “A Note on the Stick Fast Motif,” Journal of American Folklore, 57 [1944]: 128–131.)
* The sarcophagus or casket is an alternative for the belly of the whale. Compare Moses in the bulrushes.
* * *
Endnotes
[1] Grimm’s Fairy Tales, No. 1, “The Frog King.”
[2] The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Standard Edition, VI; orig. 1901).
[3] Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism, A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1911), Part II, “The Mystic Way,” Chapter II, “The Awakening of the Self.”
[4] Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (translated by James Strachey, Standard Edition, XVI; London: Hogarth Press, 1963), pp. 396–97 (orig. 1916–17).
[5] Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur, I, p. xix. This pursuit of the hart and view of the “questyng beast” marks the beginning of the mysteries associated with the Quest of the Holy Grail.
[6] George A. Dorsey and Alfred L. Kroeber, Traditions of the Arapaho (Chicago: Field Columbia Museum, Publication 81, Anthropological Series, vol. V; 1903), p. 300. Reprinted in Stith Thompson’s Tales of the North American Indians (Cambridge, MA, 1929), p. 128.
[7] C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (Collected Works, vol. 12; New York and London, 1953), pars. 71, 73. (Orig. 1935.)
[8] Wilhelm Stekel, Die Sprache des Traumes (Wiesbaden: Verlag von J. F. Bergmann, 1911), p. 352. Dr. Stekel points out the relationship of the blood-red glow to the thought of the blood coughed up in consumption.
[9] Reprinted by permission of the publishers from Henry Clarke Warren, Buddhism in Translations (Harvard Oriental Series 3) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1896), pp. 56–57.
[10] Proverbs, 1:24–27, 32.
[11] “Spiritual books occasionally quote [this] Latin saying which has terrified more than one soul” (Ernest Dimnet, The Art of Thinking, New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1929, pp. 203–4).
[12] Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven (Portland, ME: Thomas B. Mosher, 1908), opening lines.
[13] Ibid., conclusion.
[14] Ovid, Metamorphoses, I, ll. 504–553 (translation by Frank Justus Miller, the Loeb Classical Library).
[15] See above.
[16] Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, pars. 58, 62.
[17] Grimm’s Fairy Tales, No. 50.
[18] The Thousand Nights and One Night, Richard F. Burton translation (Bombay, 1885), vol. I, pp. 164–67.
[19] Genesis, 19:26.
[20] Werner Zirus, Ahasverus, der ewige Jude (Stoff- und Motivgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 6, Berlin and Leipzig, 1930), p. 1.
[21] See above.
[22] See Otto Rank, Art and Artist, translated by Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1943), pp. 40–41: “If we compare the neurotic with the productive type, it is evident that the former suffers from an excessive check on his impulsive life....Both are distinguished fundamentally from the average type, who accepts himself as he is, by their tendency to exercise their volition in reshaping themselves. There is, however, this difference: that the neurotic, in this voluntary remaking of his ego, does not get beyond the destructive preliminary work and is therefore unable to detach the whole creative process from his own person and transfer it to an ideological abstraction. The productive artist also begins...with that re-creation of himself which results in an ideologically constructed ego; [but in his case] this ego is then in a position to shift the creative will-power from his own person to ideological representations of that person and thus render it objective. It must be admitted that this process is in a measure limited to within the individual himself, and that not only in its constructive, but also in its destructive aspects. This explains why hardly any productive work gets through without morbid crises of a ‘neurotic’ nature.”
[23] Abridged from Burton, op cit., vol. III, pp. 213–28.
[24] Bruno Gutmann, Volksbuch der Wadschagga (Leipzig, 1914), p. 144.
[25] Washington Matthews, Navaho Legends (Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, vol. V, New York, 1897), p. 109.
[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 I, 2nd ed., (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 33–49; Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Myth as Metaphor and as Religion (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2002), pp. 63–70; and Joseph Campbell, “The Spirit Land,” Mythos: The Shaping of Our Modern Tradition (Silver Spring, MD: Acorn Media, 2007) — Ed.]
[26] Dante, “Paradiso,” XXXIII, 12–21 (translation by Charles Eliot Norton, op cit., vol. III, p. 252; quoted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, publishers).
[27] See Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, translated by Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1926–28), vol. I, p. 144. “Supposing,” adds Spengler, “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 harmony of metaphysical rhythm” (ibid., p. 142). This corresponds to Thomas Carlyle’s idea of the Hero King, as “Ableman” (On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, Lecture VI).
[28] During Hellenistic times an amalgamation of Hermes and Thoth 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” sealed retort, in which were placed the mystical metals, was regarded as a realm apart — a special region of heightened forces comparable to the mythologi
cal 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 of divine saviors (see below). (See C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, part III, “Religious Ideas in Alchemy.” [Orig. 1936.] For the retort, see par. 338. For Hermes Trismegistus, see par. 173 and index, s.v.)
[29] Wilhelm Stekel, Die Sprache des Traumes, pp. 70–71.
[30] Ibid., p. 71.
[31] Koran, 37:158.
[32] Adapted from Burton, op cit., vol. III, pp. 223–30.
[33] Compare the serpent of the dream.
[34] Leonhard S. Schultze, Aus Namaland und Kalahari (Jena, 1907), p. 392.
[35] Ibid., pp. 404, 448.
[36] David Clement Scott, A Cyclopaedic Dictionary of the Mang’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 suddenly caught me and shook me, and then I woke up. I have dreamt about this foot several times.”
The boy had heard a report that his father, who was a sailor, had recently had an accident at sea in which he had broken his ankle (C.W. Kimmins, Children’s Dreams, An Unexplored Land, London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1937, p. 107).
“The foot,” writes Dr. Freud, “is an age-old sexual symbol which occurs even in mythology” (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, p. 155). The name Oedipus, it should be noted, means “the swollen footed.”
[37] Compare V. J. Mansikka, in Hastings’ Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. IV, p. 628; article “Demons and Spirits (Slavic).” The cluster of articles by a number of authorities, gathered together in this volume under the general heading “Demons and Spirits” (treating severally of the African, Oceanic, Assyro-Babylonian, Buddhist, Celtic, Chinese, Christian, Coptic, Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew, Indian, Jain, Japanese, Jewish, Moslem, Persian, Roman, Slavic, Teutonic, and Tibetan varieties), is an excellent introduction to the subject.
[38] Ibid., p. 629. Compare the Lorelei. Mansikka’s discussion of the Slavic forest-, field-, and water-spirits is based on Hanus Máchal’s comprehensive Nákres slovanského bájeslovi (Prague, 1891), an English abridgment of which will be found in Máchal’s Slavic Mythology (The Mythology of All Races, vol. III, Boston, 1918).
[39] Wilhelm Stekel, Fortschritte und Technik der Traumdeutung (Vienna-Leipzig-Bern: Verlag für Medizin, Weidmann und Cie., 1935), p. 37.
[40] A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders (2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 1933), pp. 175–77.
[41] R.H. Codrington, The Melanesians, Their Anthropology and Folklore (Oxford University Press, 1891), p. 189.
[42] Jataka, 1:1. Abridged from translation by Eugene Watson Burlingame, Buddhist Parables (Yale University Press, 1922), pp. 32–34. Reprinted by permission of the publishers.
[43] Coomaraswamy, Journal of American Folklore 57, 1944, p. 129.
[44] Jataka, 55:1, 272–75. Adapted, with slight abridgment, from the translation of Eugene Watson Burlingame, op cit., pp. 41–44. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press, publishers.
[45] Nicholas of Cusa, De visione Dei, 9, 11; cited by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, “On the One and Only Transmigrant” (Supplement to the Journal of the American Oriental Society, April–June, 1944), p. 25.
[46] Ovid, Metamorphoses, VII, p. 62; XV, p. 338.
[47] See Figure 14 ("The Rocks That Crush, The Reeds That Cut") and the associated story.
[48] Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha, VIII. The adventures ascribed by Longfellow to the Iroquois chieftain Hiawatha belong properly to the Algonquin culture hero Manabozho. Hiawatha was an actual historical personage of the sixteenth century. See below.
[49] Leo Frobenius, Das Zeitalter des Sonnengottes (Berlin, 1904), p. 85.
[50] Henry Callaway, Nursery Tales and Traditions of the Zulus (London: Trübner, 1868), p. 331.
[51] Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, “Akimcanna: Self-Naughting” (New Indian Antiquary, vol. III, Bombay, 1940), p. 6, note 14, citing and discussing Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, p. 63, 3.
[52] Sir James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (one-volume edition), pp. 347–49. Copyright 1922 by the Macmillan Company and used with their permission.
[53] Ibid., p. 280.
[54] Duarte Barbosa, A Description of the Coasts of East Africa and Malabar in the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century (London: Hakluyt Society, 1866), p. 172; cited by Frazer, op cit., pp. 274–75. Reprinted by permission of the Macmillan Company, publishers.
Figure 21. The Temptation of St. Anthony (copperplate engraving, Germany, c. a.d. 1470)
CHAPTER II
Initiation
1. The Road of Trials
Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials. This is a favorite phase of the myth-adventure. It has produced a world literature of miraculous tests and ordeals. The hero is covertly aided by the advice, amulets, and secret agents of the supernatural helper whom he met before his entrance into this region. Or it may be that he here discovers for the first time that there is a benign power everywhere supporting him in his superhuman passage.
One of the best known and most charming examples of the “difficult tasks” motif is that of Psyche’s quest for her lost lover, Cupid.[1] Here all the principal roles are reversed: instead of the lover trying to win his bride, it is the bride trying to win her lover; and instead of a cruel father withholding his daughter from the lover, it is the jealous mother, Venus, hiding her son, Cupid, from his bride. When Psyche pleaded with Venus, the goddess grasped her violently by the hair and dashed her head upon the ground, then took a great quantity of wheat, barley, millet, poppy seed, peas, lentils, and beans, mingled these all together in a heap, and commanded the girl to sort them before night. Psyche was aided by an army of ants. Venus told her, next, to gather the golden wool of certain dangerous wild sheep, sharp of horn and poisonous of bite, that inhabited an inaccessible valley in a dangerous wood. But a green reed instructed her how to gather from the reeds round about the golden locks shed by the sheep in their passage. The goddess now required a bottle of water from a freezing spring high on a towering rock beset by sleepless dragons. An eagle approached, and accomplished the marvelous task. Psyche was ordered, finally, to bring from the abyss of the underworld a box full of supernatural beauty. But a high tower told her how to go down to the world below, gave her coins for Charon and sops for Cerberus, and sped her on her way.
Psyche’s voyage to the underworld is but one of innumerable such adventures undertaken by the heroes of fairy tale and myth. Among the most perilous are those of the shamans of the peoples of the farthest north (the Lapps, Siberians, Eskimo, and certain American Indian tribes), when they go to seek out and recover the lost or abducted souls of the sick. The shaman of the Siberians is clothed for the adventure in a magical costume representing a bird or reindeer, the shadow principle of the shaman himself, the shape of his soul. His drum is his animal — his eagle, reindeer, or horse; he is said to fly or ride on it. The stick that he carries is another of his aids. And he is attended by a host of invisible familiars.
An early voyager among the Lapps has left a vivid description of the weird performance of one of these strange emissaries into the kingdoms of the dead.[2] Since the yonder world is a place of everlasting night, the ceremonial of the shaman has to take place after dark. The friends and neighbors gather in the
flickering, dimly lighted hut of the patient, and follow attentively the gesticulations of the magician. First he summons the helping spirits; these arrive, invisible to all but himself. Two women in ceremonial attire, but without belts and wearing linen hoods, a man without hood or belt, and a girl not as yet adult are in attendance.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces Page 11