The Hero with a Thousand Faces

by Joseph Campbell

  He wears a garland of eight thousand rays, in which is seen fully reflected a state of perfect beauty. The color of his body is purple gold. His palms have the mixed color of five hundred lotuses, while each finger tip has eighty-four thousand signet-marks, and each mark eighty-four thousand colors; each color has eighty-four thousand rays which are soft and mild and shine over all things that exist. With these jewel hands he draws and embraces all beings. The halo surrounding his head is studded with five hundred Buddhas, miraculously transformed, each attended by five hundred Bodhisattvas, who are attended, in turn, by numberless gods. And when he puts his feet down to the ground, the flowers of diamonds and jewels that are scattered cover everything in all directions. The color of his face is gold. While in his towering crown of gems stands a Buddha, two hundred and fifty miles high.[88]

  In China and Japan this sublimely gentle Bodhisattva is represented not only in male form, but also as female. Kwan Yin of China, Kannon of Japan — the Madonna of the Far East — is precisely this benevolent regarder of the world. She will be found in every Buddhist temple of the farthest Orient. She is blessed alike to the simple and to the wise; for behind her vow there lies a profound intuition, world-redeeming, world-sustaining. The pause on the threshold of nirvāṇa, the resolution to forego until the end of time (which never ends) immersion in the untroubled pool of eternity, represents a realization that the distinction between eternity and time is only apparent — made, perforce, by the rational mind, but dissolved in the perfect knowledge of the mind that has transcended the pairs of opposites. What is understood is that time and eternity are two aspects of the same experience-whole, two planes of the same nondual ineffable; i.e., the jewel of eternity is in the lotus of birth and death: om mani padme hum.

  The first wonder to be noted here is the androgynous character of the Bodhisattva: masculine Avalokiteśvara, feminine Kwan Yin.

  Figure 33. Kwan Yin, the Avalokiteśvara Bodhisattva (painted wood, China, eleventh–thirteenth century a.d.)

  Male-female gods are not uncommon in the world of myth. They emerge always with a certain mystery; for they conduct the mind beyond objective experience into a symbolic realm where duality is left behind. Awonawilona, chief god of the pueblo of Zuni, the maker and container of all, is sometimes spoken of as he, but is actually he-she. The Great Original of the Chinese chronicles, the holy woman T’ai Yuan, combined in her person the masculine Yang and the feminine Yin.

  Yang, the light, active, masculine principle, and Yin, the dark, passive, and feminine, in their interaction underlie and constitute the whole world of forms (“the ten thousand things”). They proceed from and together make manifest Tao: the source and law of being. Tao means “road,” or “way.” Tao is the way or course of nature, destiny, cosmic order; the Absolute made manifest. Tao is therefore also “truth,” “right conduct.” Yang and Yin together as Tao are depicted thus: ☯. Tao underlies the cosmos. Tao inhabits every created thing.

  The kabbalistic teachings of the medieval Jews, as well as the Gnostic Christian writings of the second century, represent the Word Made Flesh as androgynous — which was indeed the state of Adam as he was created, before the female aspect, Eve, was removed into another form. And among the Greeks, not only Hermaphrodite (the child of Hermes and Aphrodite),[89] but Eros too, the divinity of love (the first of the gods, according to Plato),[90] were in sex both female and male.

  “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”[91] The question may arise in the mind as to the nature of the image of God; but the answer is already given in the text, and is clear enough. “When the Holy One, Blessed be He, created the first man, He created him androgynous.”[92] The removal of the feminine into another form symbolizes the beginning of the fall from perfection into duality; and it was naturally followed by the discovery of the duality of good and evil, exile from the garden where God walks on earth, and thereupon the building of the Wall of Paradise, constituted of the “coincidence of opposites,”[93] by which Man (now man and woman) is cut off from not only the vision but even the recollection of the image of God.

  This is the biblical version of a myth known to many lands. It represents one of the basic ways of symbolizing the mystery of creation: the devolvement of eternity into time, the breaking of the one into the two and then the many, as well as the generation of new life through the reconjunction of the two. This image stands at the beginning of the cosmogonic cycle,[94] and with equal propriety at the conclusion of the hero-task, at the moment when the wall of Paradise is dissolved, the divine form found and recollected, and wisdom regained.[95]

  Figure 34. Androgynous Ancestor (carved wood, Mali, twentieth century a.d.)

  Tiresias, the blinded seer, was both male and female: his eyes were closed to the broken forms of the light-world of the pairs of opposites, yet he saw in his own interior darkness the destiny of Oedipus.[96] Śiva appears united in a single body with Śakti, his spouse — he the right side, she the left — in the manifestation known as Ardhanārīśvara, “The Half-Woman Lord.”[97] The ancestral images of certain African and Melanesian tribes show on one being the breasts of the mother and the beard and penis of the father.[98] And in Australia, about a year following the ordeal of the circumcision, the candidate for full manhood undergoes a second ritual operation — that of subincision (a slitting open of the underside of the penis, to form a permanent cleft into the urethra). The opening is termed the “penis womb.” It is a symbolical male vagina. The hero has become, by virtue of the ceremonial, more than man.[99]

  The blood for ceremonial painting and for gluing white bird’s-down to the body is derived by the Australian fathers from their subincision holes. They break open again the old wounds, and let it flow.[100] It symbolizes at once the menstrual blood of the vagina and the semen of the male, as well as urine, water, and male milk. The flowing shows that the old men have the source of life and nourishment within themselves;[101] i.e., that they and the inexhaustible world fountain are the same.[102]

  The call of the Great Father Snake was alarming to the child; the mother was protection. But the father came. He was the guide and initiator into the mysteries of the unknown. As the original intruder into the paradise of the infant with its mother, the father is the archetypal enemy; hence, throughout life all enemies are symbolical (to the unconscious) of the father. “Whatever is killed becomes the father.”[103] Hence the veneration in headhunting communities (in New Guinea, for example) of the heads brought home from vendetta raids.[104] Hence, too, the irresistible compulsion to make war: the impulse to destroy the father is continually transforming itself into public violence. The old men of the immediate community or race protect themselves from their growing sons by the psychological magic of their totem ceremonials. They enact the ogre father, and then reveal themselves to be the feeding mother too. A new and larger paradise is thus established. But this paradise does not include the traditional enemy tribes, or races, against whom aggression is still systematically projected. All of the “good” father-mother content is saved for home, while the “bad” is flung abroad and about: “for who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?”[105] “And slacken not in following up the enemy: if ye are suffering hardships, they are suffering similar hardships; but ye have hope from Allah, while they have none.”[106]

  Totem, tribal, racial, and aggressively missionizing cults represent only partial solutions of the psychological problem of subduing hate by love; they only partially initiate. Ego is not annihilated in them; rather, it is enlarged; instead of thinking only of himself, the individual becomes dedicated to the whole of his society. The rest of the world meanwhile (that is to say, by far the greater portion of mankind) is left outside the sphere of his sympathy and protection because outside the sphere of the protection of his god. And there takes place, then, that dramatic divorce of the two principles of love and hate which the pages of history so b
ountifully illustrate. Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world. The laws of the City of God are applied only to his in-group (tribe, church, nation, class, or what not) while the fire of a perpetual holy war is hurled (with good conscience, and indeed a sense of pious service) against whatever uncircumcised, barbarian, heathen, “native,” or alien people happens to occupy the position of neighbor.[107]

  The world is full of the resultant mutually contending bands: totem-, flag-, and party-worshipers. Even the so-called Christian nations — which are supposed to be following a “World” Redeemer — are better known to history for their colonial barbarity and internecine strife than for any practical display of that unconditioned love, synonymous with the effective conquest of ego, ego’s world, and ego’s tribal god, which was taught by their professed supreme Lord:

  I say unto you, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you. Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you. And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take thy coat also. Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again. And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. For if ye love them which love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love those that love them. And if ye do good to them which do good to you, what thank have ye? for sinners also do even the same. And if ye tend to them of whom ye hope to receive, what thank have ye? for sinners also lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil. Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.[108]

  Compare the following Christian letter:

  In the Year of Our Lord 1682

  To ye aged and beloved, Mr. John Higginson:

  There be now at sea a ship called Welcome, which has on board 100 or more of the heretics and malignants called Quakers, with W. Penn, who is the chief scamp, at the head of them. The General Court has accordingly given sacred orders to Master Malachi Huscott, of the brig Porpoise, to waylay the said Welcome slyly as near the Cape of Cod as may be, and make captive the said Penn and his ungodly crew, so that the Lord may be glorified and not mocked on the soil of this new country with the heathen worship of these people. Much spoil can be made of selling the whole lot to Barbadoes, where slaves fetch good prices in rum and sugar and we shall not only do the Lord great good by punishing the wicked, but we shall make great good for His Minister and people.

  Yours in the bowels of Christ,

  Cotton Mather[109]

  Once we have broken free of the prejudices of our own provincially limited ecclesiastical, tribal, or national rendition of the world archetypes, it becomes possible to understand that the supreme initiation is not that of the local motherly fathers, who then project aggression onto the neighbors for their own defense. The good news, which the World Redeemer brings and which so many have been glad to hear, zealous to preach, but reluctant, apparently, to demonstrate, is that God is love, that He can be, and is to be, loved, and that all without exception are his children.[110] Such comparatively trivial matters as the remaining details of the credo, the techniques of worship, and devices of episcopal organization (which have so absorbed the interest of Occidental theologians that they are today seriously discussed as the principal questions of religion), are merely pedantic snares, unless kept ancillary to the major teaching. Indeed, where not so kept, they have a regressive effect: they reduce the father image back again to the dimensions of the totem. And this, of course, is what has happened throughout the Christian world. One would think that we had been called upon to decide or to know whom, of all of us, the Father prefers. Whereas, the teaching is much less flattering: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”[111] The World Savior’s cross, in spite of the behavior of its professed priests, is a vastly more democratic symbol than the local flag.[112]

  Dr. Karl Menninger has pointed out[113] that though Jewish rabbis, Protestant ministers, and Catholic priests can sometimes be brought to reconcile, on a broad basis, their theoretical differences, yet whenever they begin to describe the rules and regulations by which eternal life is to be achieved, they hopelessly differ. “Up to this point the program is impeccable,” writes Dr. Menningcr. “But if no one knows for certain what the rules and regulations are, it all becomes an absurdity.” The reply to this, of course, is that given by Ramakrishna:

  God has made different religions to suit different aspirants, times, and countries. All doctrines are only so many paths; but a path is by no means God Himself. Indeed, one can reach God if one follows any of the paths with whole hearted devotion....One may eat a cake with icing either straight or sidewise. It will taste sweet either way.[114]

  The understanding of the final — and critical — implications of the world-redemptive words and symbols of the tradition of Christendom has been so disarranged, during the tumultuous centuries that have elapsed since St. Augustine’s declaration of the holy war of the Civitas Dei against the Civitas Diaboli, that the modern thinker wishing to know the meaning of a world religion (i.e., of a doctrine of universal love) must turn his mind to the other great (and much older) universal communion: that of the Buddha, where the primary word still is peace — peace to all beings.

  I do not mention Islam, because there, too, the doctrine is preached in terms of the holy war and thus obscured. It is certainly true that there, as well as here, many have known that the proper field of battle is not geographical but psychological (compare Rumi: “What is ‘beheading’? Slaying the carnal soul in the holy war.”[115]); nevertheless, the popular and orthodox expression of both the Mohammedan and the Christian doctrines has been so ferocious that it requires a very sophisticated reading to discern in either mission the operation of love.

  The following Tibetan verses, for example, from two hymns of the poet-saint Milarepa, were composed about the time that Pope Urban II was preaching the First Crusade:

  Amid the City of Illusoriness of the Six World-Planes

  The chief factor is the sin and obscuration born of evil works;

  Therein the being followeth dictates of likes and dislikes,

  And findeth ne’er the time to know Equality:

  Avoid, O my son, likes and dislikes.[116]

  “The Emptiness of All Things” (Sanskrit: śūnyatā, “voidness”) refers, on the one hand, to the illusory nature of the phenomenal world and on the other, to the impropriety of attributing such qualities as we may know from our experience of the phenomenal world to the imperishable.

  In the Heavenly Radiance of the Voidness,

  There existeth not shadow of thing or concept,

  Yet it pervadeth all objects of knowledge;

  Obeisance to the Immutable Voidness.[118]

  If ye realize the Emptiness of All Things, Compassion will arise within your hearts;

  If ye lose all differentiation between yourselves and others, fit to serve others ye will be;

  And when in serving others ye shall win success, then shall ye meet with me;

  And finding me, ye shall attain to Buddhahood.[117]

  Peace is at the heart of all because Avalokiteśvara–Kwan Yin, the mighty Bodhisattva, Boundless Love, includes, regards, and dwells within (without exception) every sentient being. The perfection of the delicate wings of an insect, broken in the passage of time, he regards — and he himself is both their perfection and their disintegration. The perennial agony of man, self-torturing, deluded, tangled in the net of his own tenuous delirium, frustrated, yet having within himself, undiscovered, absolutely unutilized, the secret of release: this too he regards — and is. Serene above man, the angels; below man, the demons and unhappy dead: these all are drawn to the Bodhisattva by the rays of his jewel hands, and they are he, as he is they. The bounded, shackled centers of consciousness, myriad-fol
d, on every plane of existence (not only in this present universe, limited by the Milky Way, but beyond, into the reaches of space), galaxy beyond galaxy, world beyond world of universes, coming into being out of the timeless pool of the void, bursting into life, and like a bubble therewith vanishing: time and time again: lives by the multitude: all suffering: each bounded in the tenuous, tight circle of itself — lashing, killing, hating, and desiring peace beyond victory: these all are the children, the mad figures of the transitory yet inexhaustible, long world dream of the All-Regarding, whose essence is the essence of Emptiness: “The Lord Looking Down in Pity.”

  But the name means also: “The Lord Who Is Seen Within.”* We are all reflexes of the image of the Bodhisattva. The sufferer within us is that divine being. We and that protecting father are one. This is the redeeming insight. That protecting father is every man we meet. And so it must be known that, though this ignorant, limited, self-defending, suffering body may regard itself as threatened by some other — the enemy — that one too is the God. The ogre breaks us, but the hero, the fit candidate, undergoes the initiation “like a man”; and behold, it was the father: we in Him and He in us.[119] The dear, protecting mother of our body could not defend us from the Great Father Serpent; the mortal, tangible body that she gave us was delivered into his frightening power. But death was not the end. New life, new birth, new knowledge of existence (so that we live not in this physique only, but in all bodies, all physiques of the world, as the Bodhisattva) was given us. That father was himself the womb, the mother, of a second birth.[120]