The Hero with a Thousand Faces

by Joseph Campbell

  Four symbolical colors, representing the points of the compass, play a prominent role in Navaho iconography and cult. They are white, blue, yellow, and black, signifying, respectively, east, south, west, and north. These correspond to the red, white, green, and black on the hat of the African trickster divinity Edshu; for the House of the Father, like the Father himself, symbolizes the Center.

  The Twin Heroes are tested against the symbols of the four directions, to discover whether they partake of the faults and limitations of any one of the quarters.

  The bearer of the sun strode into his home, removed the sun from his back, and hung it on a peg on the west wall of the room, where it shook and clanged for some time, going “tla, tla, tla, tla.” He turned to the older woman and demanded angrily: “Who were those two that entered here today?” But the woman did not reply. The young people looked at one another. The bearer of the sun put his question angrily four times before the woman said to him at last: “It would be well for you not to say too much. Two young men came hither today, seeking their father. You have told me that you pay no visits when you go abroad, and that you have met no woman but me. Whose sons, then, are these?” She pointed to the bundle on the shelf, and the children smiled significantly at one another.

  The bearer of the sun took the bundle from the shelf, unrolled the four robes (the robes of dawn, blue sky, yellow evening light, and darkness), and the boys fell out on the floor. He immediately seized them. Fiercely, he flung them at some great sharp spikes of white shell that stood in the east. The boys tightly clutched their life-feathers and bounded back. The man hurled them, equally, at spikes of turquoise in the south, haliotis in the west, and black rock in the north. The boys always clutched their life-feathers tightly and came bounding back. “I wish it were indeed true,” said the Sun, “that they were my children.”

  The terrible father assayed then to steam the boys to death in an overheated sweatlodge. They were aided by the winds, who provided a protected retreat within the lodge in which to hide. “Yes, these are my children,” said the Sun when they emerged — but that was only a ruse; for he was still planning to trick them. The final ordeal was a smoking-pipe filled with poison. A spiny caterpillar warned the boys and gave them something to put into their mouths. They smoked the pipe without harm, passing it back and forth to one another till it was finished. They even said it tasted sweet. The Sun was proud. He was completely satisfied. “Now, my children,” he asked, “what is it you want from me? Why do you seek me?” The Twin Heroes had won the full confidence of the Sun, their father.[47]

  The need for great care on the part of the father, admitting to his house only those who have been thoroughly tested, is illustrated by the unhappy exploit of the lad Phaëthon, described in a famous tale of the Greeks. Born of a virgin in Ethiopia and taunted by his playmates to search the question of his father, he set off across Persia and India to find the palace of the Sun — for his mother had told him that his father was Phoebus, the god who drove the solar chariot.

  “The palace of the Sun stood high on lofty columns, bright with glittering gold and bronze that shone like fire. Gleaming ivory crowned the gables above; the double folding doors were radiant with burnished silver. And the workmanship was more beautiful than the materials.”

  Climbing the steep path, Phaëthon arrived beneath the roof. And he discovered Phoebus sitting on an emerald throne, surrounded by the Hours and the Seasons, and by Day, Month, Year, and Century. The bold youngster had to halt at the threshold, his mortal eyes unable to bear the light; but the father gently spoke to him across the hall.

  “Why have you come?” the father asked. “What do you seek, O Phaëthon — a son no father need deny?”

  The lad respectfully replied: “O my father (if thou grantest me the right to use that name)! Phoebus! Light of the entire world! Grant me a proof, my father, by which all may know me for thy true son.”

  The great god set his glittering crown aside and bade the boy approach. He gathered him into his arms. Then he promised, sealing the promise with a binding oath, that any proof the lad desired would be granted.

  What Phaëthon desired was his father’s chariot, and the right to drive the winged horses for a day.

  “Such a request,” said the father, “proves my promise to have been rashly made.” He put the boy a little away from him and sought to dissuade him from the demand. “In your ignorance,” said he, “you are asking for more than can be granted even to the gods. Each of the gods may do as he will, and yet none, save myself, has the power to take his place in my chariot of fire; no, not even Zeus.”

  Phoebus reasoned. Phaëthon was adamant. Unable to retract the oath, the father delayed as long as time would allow, but was finally forced to conduct his stubborn son to the prodigious chariot: its axle of gold and the pole of gold, its wheels with golden tires and a ring of silver spokes. The yoke was set with chrysolites and jewels. The Hours were already leading the four horses from their lofty stalls, breathing fire and filled with ambrosial food. They put upon them the clanking bridles; the great animals pawed at the bars. Phoebus anointed Phaëthon’s face with an ointment to protect it against the flames and then placed on his head the radiant crown.

  “If, at least, you can obey your father’s warnings,” the divinity advised,

  spare the lash and hold tightly to the reins. The horses go fast enough of themselves. And do not follow the straight road ­directly through the five zones of heaven, but turn off at the fork to the left — the tracks of my wheels you will clearly see. Furthermore, so that the sky and earth may have equal heat, be careful to go neither too high nor too low; for if you go too high you will burn up the skies, and if you go too low ignite the earth. In the middle is the safest path.

  But hurry! While I am speaking, dewy Night has reached her goal on the western shore. We are summoned. Behold, the dawn is glowing. Boy, may Fortune aid and conduct you better than you can guide yourself. Here, grasp the reins.

  Tethys, the goddess of the sea, had dropped the bars, and the horses, with a jolt, abruptly started; cleaving with their feet the clouds; beating the air with their wings; outrunning all the winds that were rising from the same eastern quarter. Immediately — the chariot was so light without its accustomed weight — the car began to rock about like a ship tossing without ballast on the waves. The driver, panic-stricken, forgot the reins, and knew nothing of the road. Wildly mounting, the team grazed the heights of the sky and startled the remotest constellations. The Great and Little Bear were scorched. The Serpent lying curled about the polar stars grew warm, and with the heat grew dangerously fierce. Boötes took flight, encumbered with his plough. The Scorpion struck with his tail.

  Figure 29. The Fall of Phaëthon (ink on parchment, Italy, a.d. 1533)

  The chariot, having roared for some time through unknown regions of the air, knocking against the stars, next plunged down crazily to the clouds just above the ground; and the Moon beheld, in amazement, her brother’s horses running below her own. The clouds evaporated. The earth burst into flame. Mountains blazed; cities perished with their walls; nations were reduced to ashes. That was the time the peoples of Ethiopia became black; for the blood was drawn to the surface of their bodies by the heat. Libya became a desert. The Nile fled in terror to the ends of the earth and hid its head, and it is hidden yet.

  Mother Earth, shielding her scorched brow with her hand, choking with hot smoke, lifted her great voice and called upon Jove, the father of all things, to save his world. “Look around!” she cried at him. “The heavens are asmoke from pole to pole. Great Jove, if the sea perish, and the land, and all the realms of the sky, then we are back again in the chaos of the beginning! Take thought! Take thought for the safety of our universe! Save from the flames whatever yet remains!”

  Jove, the Almighty Father, hastily summoned the gods to witness that unless some measure were quickly taken all was lost. Thereupon he hurried to the zenith, took a thunderbolt in his right hand, and flung
it from beside his ear. The car shattered; the horses, terrified, broke loose; Phaëthon, fire raging in his hair, descended like a falling star. And the river Po received his burning frame.

  The Naiads of that land consigned his body to a tomb, whereupon this epitaph:

  Here Phaëthon lies: in Phoebus’ car he fared,

  And though he greatly failed, more greatly dared.[48]

  This tale of indulgent parenthood illustrates the antique idea that when the roles of life are assumed by the improperly initiated, chaos supervenes. When the child outgrows the popular idyl of the mother breast and turns to face the world of specialized adult action, it passes, spiritually, into the sphere of the father — who becomes, for his son, the sign of the future task, and for his daughter, of the future husband. Whether he knows it or not, and no matter what his position in society, the father is the initiating priest through whom the young being passes on into the larger world. And just as, formerly, the mother represented the “good” and “evil,” so now does he, but with this complication — that there is a new element of rivalry in the picture: the son against the father for the mastery of the universe, and the daughter against the mother to be the mastered world.

  The traditional idea of initiation combines an introduction of the candidate into the techniques, duties, and prerogatives of his vocation with a radical readjustment of his emotional relationship to the parental images. The mystagogue (father or father-substitute) is to entrust the symbols of office only to a son who has been effectually purged of all inappropriate infantile cathexes — for whom the just, impersonal exercise of the powers will not be rendered impossible by unconscious (or perhaps even conscious and rationalized) motives of self-aggrandizement, personal preference, or resentment. Ideally, the invested one has been divested of his mere humanity and is representative of an impersonal cosmic force. He is the twice-born: he has become himself the father. And he is competent, consequently, now to enact himself the role of the initiator, the guide, the sun door, through whom one may pass from the infantile illusions of “good” and “evil” to an experience of the majesty of cosmic law, purged of hope and fear, and at peace in the understanding of the revelation of being.

  “Once I dreamed,” declared a little boy, “that I was captured by cannon balls [sic]. They all began to jump and yell. I was surprised to see myself in my own parlor. There was a fire, and a kettle was over it full of boiling water. They threw me into it and once in a while the cook used to come over and stick a fork into me to see if I was cooked. Then he took me out and gave me to the chief, who was just going to bite me when I woke up.”[49]

  “I dreamed that I was at table with my wife,” states a civilized gentleman.

  During the course of the meal I reached over and took our second child, a baby, and in a matter-of-fact fashion proceeded to put him into a green soup bowl, full of hot water or some hot liquid; for he came out cooked thoroughly, like chicken fricassee.

  I laid the viand on a bread board at the table and cut it up with my knife. When we had eaten all of it except a small part like a chicken gizzard I looked up, worried, to my wife and asked her, “Are you sure you wanted me to do this? Did you intend to have him for supper?”

  She answered, with a domestic frown, “After he was so well cooked, there was nothing else to do.” I was just about to finish the last piece, when I woke up.[50]

  This archetypal nightmare of the ogre father is made actual in the ordeals of primitive initiation. The boys of the Australian Murngin tribe, as we have seen, are first frightened and sent running to their mothers. The Great Father Snake is calling for their foreskins.* This places the women in the role of protectresses. A prodigious horn is blown, named Yurlunggur, which is supposed to be the call of the Great Father Snake, who has emerged from his hole. When the men come for the boys, the women grab up spears and pretend not only to fight but also to wail and cry, because the little fellows are going to be taken away and “eaten.” The men’s triangular dancing ground is the body of the Great Father Snake. There the boys are shown, during many nights, numerous dances symbolical of the various totem ancestors, and are taught the myths that explain the existing order of the world. Also, they are sent on a long journey to neighboring and distant clans, imitative of the mythological wanderings of the phallic ancestors.[51] In this way, “within” the Great Father Snake as it were, they are introduced to an interesting new object world that compensates them for their loss of the mother; and the male phallus, instead of the female breast, is made the central point (axis mundi) of the imagination.

  The culminating instruction of the long series of rites is the release of the boy’s own hero-penis from the protection of its foreskin, through the frightening and painful attack upon it of the circumciser:

  “The father [i.e., circumciser] is the one who separates the child from the mother,” writes Dr. Róheim. “What is cut off the boy is really the mother....The glans in the foreskin is the child in the mother.”[52]

  It is interesting to note the continuance to this day of the rite of circumcision in the Hebrew and Mohammedan cults, where the Feminine element has been scrupulously purged from the official, strictly monotheistic mythology. “God forgiveth not the sin of joining other gods with Him,” we read in the Koran. “The Pagans, leaving Allah, call but upon female deities.”[53]

  Among the Arunta, for example, the sound of the bull-roarers is heard from all sides when the moment has arrived for this decisive break from the past. It is night, and in the weird light of the fire suddenly appear the circumciser and his assistant.

  The noise of the bull-roarers is the voice of the great demon of the ceremony, and the pair of operators are its apparition. With their beards thrust into their mouths, signifying anger, their legs widely extended, and their arms stretched forward, the two men stand perfectly still, the actual operator in front, holding in his right hand the small flint knife with which the operation is to be conducted, and his assistant pressing close up behind him, so that the two bodies are in contact with each other. Then a man approaches through the firelight, balancing a shield on his head and at the same time snapping the thumb and first finger of each hand. The bull-roarers are making a tremendous din, which can be heard by the women and children in their distant camp. The man with the shield on his head goes down on one knee just a little in front of the operator, and immediately one of the boys is lifted from the ground by a number of his uncles, who carry him feet foremost and place him on the shield, while in deep, loud tones a chant is thundered forth by all the men. The operation is swiftly performed, the fearsome figures retire immediately from the lighted area, and the boy, in a more or less dazed condition, is attended to, and congratulated by the men to whose estate he has now just arrived. “You have done well,” they say; “you did not cry out.”[54]

  The native Australian mythologies teach that the first initiation rites were carried out in such a way that all the young men were killed.[55] The ritual is thus shown to be, among other things, a dramatized expression of the Oedipal aggression of the elder generation; and the circumcision, a mitigated castration.[56] But the rites provide also for the cannibal, patricidal impulse of the younger, rising group of males, and at the same time reveal the benign self-giving aspect of the archetypal father; for during the long period of symbolical instruction, there is a time when the initiates are forced to live only on the fresh-drawn blood of the older men. “The natives,” we are told,

  are particularly interested in the Christian communion rite, and having heard about it from missionaries they compare it to the blood-drinking rituals of their own.[57]

  In the evening the men come and take their places according to tribal precedence, the boy lying with his head on his father’s thighs. He must make no movement or he will die. The father blindfolds him with his hands because if the boy should witness the following proceedings it is believed that his father and mother will both die. The wooden vessel or a bark vessel is placed near one of the boy’s mot
her’s brothers, who, having tied his arm lightly, pierces the upper part with a nosebone and holds the arm over the vessel until a certain amount of blood has been taken. The man next to him pierces his arm, and so on, until the vessel is filled. It may hold two quarts or so. The boy takes a long draught of the blood. Should his stomach rebel, the father holds his throat to prevent his ejecting the blood, because if it happens his father, mother, sisters, and brothers would all die. The remainder of the blood is thrown over him.

  From this time on, sometimes for a whole moon, the boy is allowed no other food than human blood, Yamminga, the mythical ancestor, having made this law....Sometimes the blood is dried in the vessel and then the guardian cuts it in sections with his nose-bone, and it is eaten by the boy, the two end sections first. The sections must be regularly divided or the boy will die.[58]

  In one recorded case, two of the boys looked up when they were not supposed to. “Then the old men went forward, each with a stone knife in hand. Stooping over the two boys they opened veins in each. Out flowed the blood, and the other men all raised a death cry. The boys were lifeless. The old wirreenuns (medicine men), dipping their stone knives in the blood, touched with them the lips of all present....The bodies of the Boorah victims were cooked. Each man who had been to five Boorahs ate a piece of this flesh; no others were allowed to see this done”[61]

  Frequently the men who give their blood faint and remain in a state of coma for an hour or more because of exhaustion.[59] “In former times,” writes another observer, “this blood (drunk ceremonially by the novices) was obtained from a man who was killed for the purpose, and portions of his body were eaten.”[60] “Here,” comments Dr. Róheim, “we come as near to a ritual representation of the killing and eating of the primal father as we can ever get.”