The Hero with a Thousand Faces

by Joseph Campbell

  There can be no doubt that no matter how unilluminated the stark-naked Australian savages may seem to us, their symbolical ceremonials represent a survival into modern times of an incredibly old system of spiritual instruction, the far-flung evidences of which are to be found not only in all the lands and islands bordering the Indian Ocean, but also among the remains of the archaic centers of what we tend to regard as our own very special brand of civilization. Just how much the old men know, it is difficult to judge from the published accounts of our Occidental observers. But it can be seen from a comparison of the figures of Australian ritual with those familiar to us from higher cultures, that the great themes, the ageless archetypes, and their operation upon the soul remain the same.

  For an astounding revelation of the survival in contemporary Melanesia of a symbolic system essentially identical with that of the Egypto-Babylonian, Trojan-Cretan “labyrinth complex” of the second millennium b.c., see John Layard’s Stone Men of Malekula.[62] W.F.J. Knight has discussed the evident relationship of the Malekulan “journey of the soul to the underworld” with the classical descent of Aeneas, and the Babylonian of Gilgamesh,[63] while W.J. Perry thought he could recognize evidences of this culture-continuity running all the way from Egypt and Sumer out through the Oceanic area to North America.[64] Many scholars have pointed out the close correspondences between the details of the classical Greek and primitive Australian rites of initiation.[65]

  It is still uncertain by what means and in what eras the mythological and cultural patterns of the various archaic civilizations may have been disseminated to the farthest corners of the earth; yet it can be stated categorically that few (if any) of the so-called “primitive cultures” studied by our anthropologists represent autochthonous growths. They are, rather, local adaptations, provincial degenerations, and immensely old fossilizations of folkways that were developed in very different lands, often under much less simple circumstances, and by other races.[66]

  Come, O Dithyrambos,

  Enter this my male womb.[67]

  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.”[68] 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, Bringing-in-Summer, and Killing of the Christmas Wren have continued the tradition, in a mood of frolic, into our contemporary calendar;[69] 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 confirmation, the symbolical eating of the Flesh and drinking of the Blood) solemnly, and sometimes effectively, we are united to those immortal images of initiatory might, through the sacramental operation of which man, since the beginning of his day on earth, has dispelled the terrors of his phenomenality and won through to the all-transfiguring vision of immortal being. “For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?”[70]

  Figure 30. The Sorceror (rock engraving with black paint fill-in, Paleolithic, France, c. 10,000 b.c.)

  There is a folktale told by the Basumbwa of East Africa, of a man whose dead father appeared to him, driving the cattle of Death, and conducted him along a path that went into the ground, as into a vast burrow. They came to an extensive area where there were some people. The father hid the son and went off to sleep. The Great Chief, Death, appeared the next morning. One side of him was beautiful; but the other side was rotten, maggots were dropping to the ground. His attendants were gathering the maggots. The attendants washed the sores, and when they had finished, Death said: “The one born today: if he goes trading, he will be robbed. The woman who conceives today: she will die with the child conceived. The man who cultivates today: his crops have perished. The one who is to go into the jungle has been eaten by the lion.”

  Death thus pronounced the universal curse, and returned to rest. But the following morning, when he appeared, his attendants washed and perfumed the beautiful side, massaging it with oil. When they had finished, Death pronounced the blessing: “The one born today: may he become wealthy. May the woman who conceives today give birth to a child who will live to be old. The one born today: let him go into the market; may he strike good bargains; may he trade with the blind. The man who is to enter the jungle: may he kill game; may he discover even elephants. Because today I pronounce the benediction.”

  The father then said to the son: “If you had arrived today, many things would have come into your possession. But now it is clear that poverty has been ordained for you. Tomorrow you had better go.”

  And the son returned to his home.[71]

  Figure 31. The Universal Father, Viracocha, Weeping (bronze, pre-Incan, Argentina, c. a.d. 650–750)

  The Sun in the Underworld, Lord of the Dead, is the other side of the same radiant king who rules and gives the day; for “Who is it that sustains you from the sky and from the earth? And who is it that brings out the living from the dead and the dead from the living? And who is it that rules and regulates all affairs?”[72] We recall the Wachaga tale of the very poor man, Kyazimba, who was transported by a crone to the zenith, where the Sun rests at noon;[73] there the Great Chief bestowed on him prosperity. And we recall the trickster-god Edshu, described in a tale from the other coast of Africa:[74] spreading strife was his greatest joy. These are differing views of the same dreadful Providence. In him are contained and from him proceed the contradictions, good and evil, death and life, pain and pleasure, boons and deprivation. As the person of the sun door, he is the fountainhead of all the pairs of opposites. “With Him are the keys of the Unseen.... In the end, unto Him will be your return; then will He show you the truth of all that ye did.”[75]

  The mystery of the apparently self-contradictory father is rendered tellingly in the figure of a great divinity of prehistoric Peru, named Viracocha. His tiara is the sun; he grasps a thunderbolt in either hand; and from his eyes descend, in the form of tears, the rains that refresh the life of the valleys of the world. Viracocha is the Universal God, the creator of all things; and yet, in the legends of his appearances upon the earth, he is shown wandering as a beggar, in rags and reviled. One is reminded of the Gospel of Mary and Joseph at the inn-doors of Bethlehem,[76] and of the classical story of the begging of Jove and Mercury at the home of Baucis and Philemon.[77] One is reminded also of the unrecognized Edshu. This is a theme frequently encountered in mythology; its sense is caught in the words of the Koran: “wither-soever ye turn, there is the Presence of Allah.”[78] “Though He is hidden in all things,” say the Hindus, “that Soul shines not forth; yet He is seen by subtle seers with superior, subtle intellect.”[79] “Split the stick,” runs a Gnostic aphorism, “and there is Jesus.”[80]

  Viracocha, therefore, in this manner of manifesting his ubiquity, particip
ates in the character of the highest of the universal gods. Furthermore his synthesis of sun-god and storm-god is familiar. We know it through the Hebrew mythology of Yahweh, in whom the traits of two gods are united (Yahweh, a storm-god, and El, a solar); it is apparent in the Navaho personification of the father of the Twin Warriors; it is obvious in the character of Zeus, as well as in the thunderbolt and halo of certain forms of the Buddha image. The meaning is that the grace that pours into the universe through the sun door is the same as the energy of the bolt that annihilates and is itself indestructible: the delusion-shattering light of the Imperishable is the same as the light that creates. Or again, in terms of a secondary polarity of nature: the fire blazing in the sun glows also in the fertilizing storm; the energy behind the elemental pair of opposites, fire and water, is one and the same.

  But the most extraordinary and profoundly moving of the traits of Viracocha, this nobly conceived Peruvian rendition of the universal god, is the detail that is peculiarly his own, namely that of the tears. The living waters are the tears of God. Herewith the world-discrediting insight of the monk, “All life is sorrowful,” is combined with the world-begetting affirmative of the father: “Life must be!” In full awareness of the life anguish of the creatures of his hand, in full consciousness of the roaring wilderness of pains, the brain-splitting fires of the deluded, self-ravaging, lustful, angry universe of his creation, this divinity acquiesces in the deed of supplying life to life. To withhold the seminal waters would be to annihilate; yet to give them forth is to create this world that we know. For the essence of time is flux, dissolution of the momentarily existent; and the essence of life is time. In his mercy, in his love for the forms of time, this demiurgic man of men yields countenance to the sea of pangs; but in his full awareness of what he is doing, the seminal waters of the life that he gives are the tears of his eyes.

  The paradox of creation, the coming of the forms of time out of eternity, is the germinal secret of the father. It can never be quite explained. Therefore, in every system of theology there is an umbilical point, an Achilles tendon which the finger of mother life has touched, and where the possibility of perfect knowledge has been impaired. The problem of the hero is to pierce himself (and therewith his world) precisely through that point; to shatter and annihilate that key knot of his limited existence.

  The problem of the hero going to meet the father is to open his soul beyond terror to such a degree that he will be ripe to understand how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being. The hero transcends life with its peculiar blind spot and for a moment rises to a glimpse of the source. He beholds the face of the father, understands — and the two are atoned.

  In the biblical story of Job, the Lord makes no attempt to justify in human or any other terms the ill pay meted out to his virtuous servant, “a simple and upright man, and fearing God, and avoiding evil.” Nor was it for any sins of their own that Job’s servants were slain by the Chaldean troops, his sons and daughters crushed by a collapsing roof. When his friends arrive to console him, they declare, with a pious faith in God’s justice, that Job must have done some evil to have deserved to be so frightfully afflicted. But the honest, courageous, horizon-searching sufferer insists that his deeds have been good; whereupon the comforter, Elihu, charges him with blasphemy, as naming himself more just than God.

  When the Lord himself answers Job out of the whirlwind, He makes no attempt to vindicate His work in ethical terms, but only magnifies His Presence, bidding Job do likewise on earth in human emulation of the way of heaven:

  Gird up thy loins now like a man; I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me. Wilt thou also disannul my judgment? Wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayst be righteous? Hast thou an arm like God? or canst thou thunder with a voice like him? Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty. Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud and abase him. Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place. Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret. Then I will also confess unto thee that thine own hand can save thee.[81]

  There is no word of explanation, no mention of the dubious wager with Satan described in chapter one of the Book of Job; only a thunder-and-lightning demonstration of the fact of facts, namely that man cannot measure the will of God, which derives from a center beyond the range of human categories. Categories, indeed, are totally shattered by the Almighty of the Book of Job, and remain shattered to the last. Nevertheless, to Job himself the revelation appears to have made soul-satisfying sense. He was a hero who, by his courage in the fiery furnace, his unreadiness to break down and grovel before a popular conception of the character of the All Highest, had proven himself capable of facing a greater revelation than the one that satisfied his friends. We cannot interpret his words of the last chapter as those of a man merely intimidated. They are the words of one who has seen something surpassing anything that has been said by way of justification. “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”[82] The pious comforters are humbled; Job is rewarded with a fresh house, fresh servants, and fresh daughters and sons. “After this lived Job an hundred and forty years, and saw his sons, and his sons’ sons, even four generations. So Job died, being old and full of days.”[83]

  For the son who has grown really to know the father, the agonies of the ordeal are readily borne; the world is no longer a vale of tears but a bliss-yielding, perpetual manifestation of the Presence. Contrast with the wrath of the angry God known to Jonathan Edwards and his flock, the following tender lyric from the miserable Eastern European ghettos of that same century:

  Oh, Lord of the Universe

  I will sing Thee a song.

  Where canst Thou be found,

  And where canst Thou not be found?

  Where I pass — there art Thou.

  Where I remain — there, too, Thou art.

  Thou, Thou, and only Thou.

  Doth it go well — ’tis thanks to Thee.

  Doth it go ill — ah, ’tis also thanks to Thee.

  Thou art, Thou hast been, and Thou wilt be.

  Thou didst reign, Thou reignest, and Thou wilt reign.

  Thine is Heaven, Thine is Earth.

  Thou fillest the high regions,

  And Thou fillest the low regions.

  Wheresoever I turn, Thou, oh Thou, art there.[84]

  Figure 32. Bodhisattva (temple banner, Tibet, nineteenth century a.d.)

  5. Apotheosis

  One of the most powerful and beloved of the Bodhisattvas of the Mahāyāna Buddhism of Tibet, China, and Japan is the Lotus Bearer, Avalokiteśvara, “The Lord Looking Down in Pity,” so called because he regards with compassion all sentient creatures suffering the evils of existence. To him goes the millionfold-repeated prayer of the prayer wheels and temple gongs of Tibet: Om mani padme hum, “The jewel is in the lotus.” To him go perhaps more prayers per minute than to any single divinity known to man; for when, during his final life on earth as a human being, he shattered for himself the bounds of the last threshold (which moment opened to him the timelessness of the void beyond the frustrating mirage-enigmas of the named and bounded cosmos), he paused: he made a vow that before entering the void he would bring all creatures without exception to enlightenment; and since then he has permeated the whole texture of existence with the divine grace of his assisting presence, so that the least prayer addressed to him, throughout the vast spiritual empire of the Buddha, is graciously heard. Under differing forms he traverses the ten thousand worlds, and appears in the hour of need and prayer. He reveals himself in human form with two arms, in superhuman forms with four arms, or with six, or twelve, or a thousand, and he holds in one of his left hands the lotus of the world.

  Hīnayāna or Theravada Buddhism (the Buddhism surviving in Ceylon, Burma,
and Thailand) reveres the Buddha as a human hero, a supreme saint and sage. Mahāyāna Buddhism, on the other hand (the Buddhism of the north), regards the Enlightened One as a world savior, an incarnation of the universal principle of enlightenment.

  A Bodhisattva is a personage on the point of Buddhahood: according to the Hīnayāna view, an adept who will become a Buddha in a subsequent reincarnation; according to the Mahāyāna view (as the following paragraphs will show), a type of world savior, representing particularly the universal principle of compassion. The word bodhisattva (Sanskrit) means: “whose being or essence is enlightenment.”

  Mahāyāna Buddhism has developed a pantheon of many Bodhisattvas and many past and future Buddhas. These all inflect the manifested powers of the transcendent, one and only Ādi-Buddha (“Primal Buddha”),[87] who is the highest conceivable source and ultimate boundary of all being, suspended in the void of nonbeing like a wonderful bubble.

  Like the Buddha himself, this godlike being is a pattern of the divine state to which the human hero attains who has gone beyond the last terrors of ignorance. “When the envelopment of consciousness has been annihilated, then he becomes free of all fear, beyond the reach of change.”[85] This is the release potential within us all, and which anyone can attain — through herohood; for, as we read: “All things are Buddha-things”;[86] or again (and this is the other way of making the same statement): “All beings are without self.”

  The world is filled and illumined by, but does not hold, the Bodhisattva (“he whose being is enlightenment”); rather, it is he who holds the world, the lotus. Pain and pleasure do not enclose him, he encloses them — and with profound repose. And since he is what all of us may be, his presence, his image, the mere naming of him, helps.