The Hero with a Thousand Faces

by Joseph Campbell

  One of the most important and delightful of the myths of the Shintō tradition of Japan — already old when chronicled in the eighth century a.d. in the “Records of Ancient Matters” — is that of the drawing forth of the beautiful sun-goddess Amaterasu from a heavenly rock-dwelling during the critical first period of the world.

  This is an example in which the rescued one is somewhat reluctant. The storm-god Susanowo, the brother of Amaterasu, had been misbehaving inexcusably. And though she had tried every means to appease him and had stretched forgiveness far beyond the limit, he continued to destroy her rice fields and to pollute her institutions. As a final insult, he broke a hole in the top of her weaving-hall and let fall through it a “heavenly piebald horse which he had flayed with a backward flaying,” at sight of which all the ladies of the goddess, who were busily weaving the august garments of the deities, were so much alarmed that they died of fear.

  Amaterasu, terrified at the sight, retired into a heavenly cave, closed the door behind her, and made it fast. This was a terrible thing for her to do; for the permanent disappearance of the sun would have meant as much as the end of the universe — the end, before it had even properly begun. With her disappearance the whole plain of high heaven and all the central land of reed plains became dark. Evil spirits ran riot through the world; numerous portents of woe arose; and the voices of the myriad of deities were like unto the flies in the fifth moon as they swarmed.

  Therefore the eight millions of gods assembled in a divine assembly in the bed of the tranquil river of heaven and bid one of their number, the deity named Thought-Includer, to devise a plan. As the result of their consultation, many things of divine efficacy were produced, among them a mirror, a sword, and cloth offerings. A great tree was set up and decorated with jewels; cocks were brought that they might keep up a perpetual crowing; bonfires were lit; grand liturgies were recited. The mirror, eight feet long, was tied to the middle branches of the tree. And a merry, noisy dance was performed by a young goddess called Uzume. The eight millions of divinities were so amused that their laughter filled the air, and the plain of high heaven shook.

  Figure 48. Amaterasu Emerges from the Cave (woodblock print, Japan, a.d. 1860)

  The sun-goddess in the cave heard the lively uproar and was amazed. She was curious to know what was going on. Slightly opening the door of the heavenly rock-dwelling, she spoke thus from within: “I thought that owing to my retirement the plain of heaven would be dark, and likewise the central land of reed plains would all be dark: how then is it that Uzume makes merry, and that likewise the eight millions of gods all laugh?” Then Uzume spoke, saying: “We rejoice and are glad because there is a deity more illustrious than Thine Augustness.” While she was thus speaking, two of the divinities pushed forward the mirror and respectfully showed it to the sun-goddess, Amaterasu; whereupon she, more and more astonished, gradually came forth from the door and gazed upon it. A powerful god took her august hand and drew her out; whereupon another stretched a rope of straw (called the shimenawa) behind her, across the entrance, saying: “Thou must not go back further in than this!” Thereupon both the plain of high heaven and the central land of reed plains again were light.[18] The sun may now retreat, for a time, every night — as does life itself, in refreshing sleep; but by the august shimenawa she is prevented from disappearing permanently.

  The motif of the sun as a goddess, instead of as a god, is a rare and precious survival from an archaic, apparently once widely diffused, mythological context. The great maternal divinity of South Arabia is the feminine sun, Ilat. The word in German for the sun (die Sonne) is feminine. Throughout Siberia, as well as in North America, scattered stories survive of a female sun. And in the fairy tale of Red Ridinghood, who was eaten by the wolf but rescued from its belly by the hunter, we may have a remote echo of the same adventure as that of Amaterasu. Traces remain in many lands; but only in Japan do we find the once-great mythology still effective in civilization; for the Emperor is a direct descendant of the grandson of Amaterasu, and as ancestress of the royal house she is honored as one of the supreme divinities of the national tradition of Shintō. In her adventures may be sensed a different world-feeling from that of the now better-known mythologies of the solar god: a certain tenderness toward the lovely gift of light, a gentle gratitude for things made visible — such as must once have distinguished the religious mood of many peoples.

  The mirror, the sword, and the tree, we recognize. The mirror, reflecting the goddess and drawing her forth from the august repose of her divine nonmanifestation, is symbolic of the world, the field of the reflected image. Therein divinity is pleased to regard its own glory, and this pleasure is itself inducement to the act of manifestation or “creation.” The sword is the counterpart of the thunderbolt. The tree is the World Axis in its wish-fulfilling, fruitful aspect — the same as that displayed in Christian homes at the season of the winter solstice, which is the moment of the rebirth or return of the sun, a joyous custom inherited from the Germanic paganism that has given to the modern German language its feminine Sonne. The dance of Uzume and the uproar of the gods belong to carnival: the world left topsy-turvy by the withdrawal of the supreme divinity, but joyous for the coming renewal. And the shimenawa, the august rope of straw that was stretched behind the goddess when she reappeared, symbolizes the graciousness of the miracle of the light’s return. This shimenawa is one of the most conspicuous, important, and silently eloquent, of the traditional symbols of the folk religion of Japan. Hung above the entrances of the temples, festooned along the streets at the New Year festival, it denotes the renovation of the world at the threshold of the return. If the Christian cross is the most telling symbol of the mythological passage into the abyss of death, the shimenawa is the simplest sign of the resurrection. The two represent the mystery of the boundary between the worlds — the existent nonexistent line.

  Amaterasu is an Oriental sister of the great Inanna, the supreme goddess of the ancient Sumerian cuneiform temple-tablets, whose descent we have already followed into the lower world. Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte, Aphrodite, Venus: those were the names she bore in the successive culture periods of the Occidental development — associated, not with the sun, but with the planet that carries her name, and at the same time with the moon, the heavens, and the fruitful earth. In Egypt she became the goddess of the Dog Star, Sirius, whose annual reappearance in the sky announced the earth-fructifying flood season of the river Nile.

  Inanna, it will be remembered, descended from the heavens into the hell region of her sister-opposite, the Queen of Death, Ereshkigal. And she left behind Ninshubur, her messenger, with instructions to rescue her should she not return. She arrived naked before the seven judges; they fastened their eyes upon her, she was turned into a corpse, and the corpse — as we have seen — was hung upon a stake.

  After three days and three nights had passed,*

  Inanna’s messenger Ninshubur,

  Her messenger of favorable words,

  Her carrier of supporting words,

  Filled the heaven with complaints for her,

  Cried for her in the assembly shrine,

  Rushed about for her in the house of the gods....

  Like a pauper in a single garment he dressed for her,

  To the Ekur, the house of Enlil, all alone he directed his step.

  Figure 49. Goddess Rising (carved marble, Italy/Greece, c. 460 b.c.)

  Enlil was the Sumerian air-god, Nanna the moon-god, Enki the water-god and god of wisdom. At the time of the composition of our document (third millennium b.c.) Enlil was the chief divinity of the Sumerian pantheon. He was quick to anger. He was the sender of the Flood. Nanna was one of his sons. In the myths the benign god Enki appears typically in the role of the helper. He is the patron and adviser both of Gilgamesh and of the flood hero, Atarhasis-Utnapishtim-Noah. The motif of Enki vs. Enlil is carried on by Classical mythology, in the counterplay of Poseidon vs. Zeus (Neptune vs. Jove).

  This is the
beginning of the rescue of the goddess, and illustrates the case of one who so knew the power of the zone into which she was entering that she took the precaution to have herself aroused. Ninshubur went first to the god Enlil; but the god said that, Inanna having gone from the great above to the great below, in the nether world the decrees of the nether world should prevail. Ninshubur next went to the god Nanna; but the god said that she had gone from the great above to the great below, and that in the nether world the decrees of the nether world should prevail. Ninshubur went to the god Enki; and the god Enki devised a plan. He fashioned two sexless creatures and entrusted to them the “food of life” and the “water of life” with instructions to proceed to the nether world and sprinkle this food and water sixty times on Inanna’s suspended corpse.

  Upon the corpse hung from a stake they directed the fear

  of the rays of fire,

  Sixty times the food of life, sixty times the water of life,

  they sprinkled upon it,

  Inanna arose.

  Inanna ascends from the nether world,

  The Anunnaki fled,

  And whoever of the nether world may have descended

  peacefully to the nether world;

  When Inanna ascends from the nether world,

  Verily the dead hasten ahead of her.

  Verily the dead hasten ahead of her.

  The small demons like reeds,

  The large demons like tablet styluses,

  Walked at her side.

  Who walked in front of her, held a staff in hand,

  Who walked at her side, carried a weapon on the loin.

  They who preceded her,

  They who preceded Inanna,

  Were beings who know not food, who know not water,

  Who eat not sprinkled flour,

  Who drink not libated wine,

  Who take away the wife from the loins of man,

  Who take away the child from the breast of the nursing mother.

  Surrounded by this ghostly, ghastly crowd, Inanna wandered through the land of Sumer, from city to city.[19]

  These three examples from widely separated culture areas — Raven, Amaterasu, and Inanna — sufficiently illustrate the rescue from without. They show in the final stages of the adventure the continued operation of the supernatural assisting force that has been attending the elect through the whole course of his ordeal. His consciousness having succumbed, the unconscious nevertheless supplies its own balances, and he is born back into the world from which he came. Instead of holding to and saving his ego, as in the pattern of the magic flight, he loses it, and yet, through grace is returned.

  This brings us to the final crisis of the round, to which the whole miraculous excursion has been but a prelude — that, namely, of the paradoxical, supremely difficult threshold-crossing of the hero’s return from the mystic realm into the land of common day. Whether rescued from without, driven from within, or gently carried along by the guiding divinities, he has yet to re-enter with his boon the long-forgotten atmosphere where men who are fractions imagine themselves to be complete. He has yet to confront society with his ego-shattering, life-redeeming elixir, and take the return blow of reasonable queries, hard resentment, and good people at a loss to comprehend.

  Figure 50. The Reappearance of the Hero: Samson with the Temple-Doors • Christ Arisen • Jonah (engraving, German, a.d. 1471)

  4. The Crossing of the Return Threshold

  The two worlds, the divine and the human, can be pictured only as distinct from each other — different as life and death, as day and night. The hero adventures out of the land we know into darkness; there accomplishes his adventure, or again is simply lost to us, imprisoned, or in danger; and his return is described as a coming back out of that yonder zone. Nevertheless — and here is a great key to the understanding of myth and symbol — the two kingdoms are actually one. The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. And the exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero. The values and distinctions that in normal life seem important disappear with the terrifying assimilation of the self into what formerly was only otherness. As in the stories of the cannibal ogresses, the fearfulness of this loss of personal individuation can be the whole burden of the transcendental experience for unqualified souls. But the hero-soul goes boldly in — and discovers the hags converted into goddesses and the dragons into the watchdogs of the gods.

  There must always remain, however, from the standpoint of normal waking consciousness, a certain baffling inconsistency between the wisdom brought forth from the deep, and the prudence usually found to be effective in the light world. Hence the common divorce of opportunism from virtue and the resultant degeneration of human existence. Martyrdom is for saints, but the common people have their institutions, and these cannot be left to grow like lilies of the field; Peter keeps drawing his sword, as in the garden, to defend the creator and sustainer of the world.[20] The boon brought from the transcendent deep becomes quickly rationalized into nonentity, and the need becomes great for another hero to refresh the word.

  How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand times, throughout the millennia of mankind’s prudent folly? That is the hero’s ultimate difficult task. How render back into light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark? How represent on a two-dimensional surface a three-dimensional form, or in a three-dimensional image a multi-dimensional meaning? How translate into terms of “yes” and “no” revelations that shatter into meaninglessness every attempt to define the pairs of opposites? How communicate to people who insist on the exclusive evidence of their senses the message of the all-generating void?

  Many failures attest to the difficulties of this life-affirmative threshold. The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real, after an experience of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the passing joys and sorrows, banalities and noisy obscenities of life. Why re-enter such a world? Why attempt to make plausible, or even interesting, to men and women consumed with passion, the experience of transcendental bliss? As dreams that were momentous by night may seem simply silly in the light of day, so the poet and the prophet can discover themselves playing the idiot before a jury of sober eyes. The easy thing is to commit the whole community to the devil and retire again into the heavenly rock-dwelling, close the door, and make it fast. But if some spiritual obstetrician has meanwhile drawn the shimenawa across the retreat, then the work of representing eternity in time, and perceiving in time eternity, cannot be avoided.

  The story of Rip van Winkle is an example of the delicate case of the returning hero. Rip moved into the adventurous realm unconsciously, as we all do every night when we go to sleep. In deep sleep, declare the Hindus, the self is unified and blissful; therefore deep sleep is called the cognitional state.[21] But though we are refreshed and sustained by these nightly visits to the source-darkness, our lives are not reformed by them; we return, like Rip, with nothing to show for the experience but our whiskers.

  He looked round for his gun, but in place of the clean, well-oiled fowling-piece, he found an old firelock lying by him, the barrel incrusted with rust, the lock falling off, and the stock worm-­eaten ....As he rose to walk, he found himself stiff in the joints, and wanting his usual activity....As he approached the village, he met a number of people, but none whom he knew; which somewhat surprised him, for he had thought himself acquainted with every one in the country round. Their dress, too, was of a different fashion from that to which he was accustomed. They all stared at him with equal marks of surprise, and, whenever they cast their eyes upon him, invariably stroked their chins. The constant recurrence of this gesture induced Rip involuntarily to do the same, when, to his astonishment, he found his beard had grown a foot long....He began to doubt whether both he and the world around him were not bewitched....

  The appearance of Rip, with his long, grizzled beard, h
is rusty fowling-piece, his uncouth dress, and the army of women and children that had gathered at his heels, soon attracted the attention of the tavern politicians. They crowded round him, eyeing him from head to foot with great curiosity. The orator bustled up to him, and, drawing him partly aside, inquired on which side he voted. Rip stared in vacant stupidity. Another short but busy little fellow pulled him by the arm, and, rising on tiptoe, inquired in his ear whether he was a Federal or a Democrat. Rip was equally at a loss to comprehend the question, when a knowing, self-important old gentleman in a sharp cocked hat made his way through the crowd, putting them to the right and left with his elbows as he passed, and, planting himself before van Winkle — with one arm akimbo, the other resting on his cane; his keen eyes and sharp hat penetrating, as it were, into his very soul — demanded in an austere tone what brought him to the election with a gun on his shoulder and a mob at his heels, and whether he meant to breed a riot in the village. “Alas! gentlemen,” cried Rip, somewhat dismayed, “I am a poor, quiet man, a native of the place, and a loyal subject to the King, God bless him!”

  Here a general shout burst from the bystanders: “A Tory, a Tory! A spy! A refugee! Hustle him! Away with him!” It was with great difficulty that the self-important man in the cocked hat restored order.[22]