The Hero with a Thousand Faces

by Joseph Campbell

  Figure 54. The Fountain of Life (paint on wood, Flanders, c. a.d. 1520)

  The female water spiritually fructified with the male fire of the Holy Ghost is the Christian counterpart of the water of transformation known to all systems of mythological imagery. This rite is a variant of the sacred marriage, which is the source-moment that generates and regenerates the world and man, precisely the mystery symbolized by the Hindu liṅgam-yonī. To enter into this font is to plunge into the mythological realm; to break the surface is to cross the threshold into the night-sea. Symbolically, the infant makes the journey when the water is poured on its head; its guide and helpers are the priest and godparents. Its goal is a visit with the parents of its Eternal Self, the Spirit of God and the Womb of Grace.[4] Then it is returned to the parents of the physical body.

  Few of us have any inkling of the sense of the rite of baptism, which was our initiation into our Church. Nevertheless, it clearly appears in the words of Jesus: “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus said to him “How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and the spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.”[5]

  The popular interpretation of baptism is that it “washes away original sin,” with emphasis rather on the cleansing than on the rebirth idea. This is a secondary interpretation. Or if the traditional birth image is remembered, nothing is said of an antecedent marriage. Mythological symbols, however, have to be followed through all their implications before they open out the full system of correspondences through which they represent, by analogy, the millennial adventure of the soul.

  * * *

  Footnotes

  * Holy Saturday, the day between the Death and Resurrection of Jesus, who is in the belly of Hell. The moment of the renewal of the eon. Compare the motif of the fire sticks discussed above.

  * * *

  Endnotes

  [1] For a discussion of this matter, see my Commentary to the Pantheon Books edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales (New York, 1944), pp. 846–56. [This commentary is also available as part of Campbell’s collection of essays, The Flight of the Wild Gander, pp. 1–19. — Ed.]

  [2] Psalm XLI, 2–4; Douay.

  [3] See the Catholic Daily Missal under “Holy Saturday.” The above is abridged from the English translation by Dom Gaspar Lefebvre, O.S.B., published in this country by the E. M. Lohmann Co., Saint Paul, MN. [At the time of the original publication of this volume, of course, the Catholic Mass would have been entirely spoken and sung in Latin. — Ed.]

  [4] In India the power (Śakti) of a god is personified in female form and represented as his consort; in the present ritual, grace is similarly symbolized.

  [5] Gospel According to John, 3:3–5.

  PART II

  The Cosmogonic Cycle

  Figure 55. The Aztec Sun Stone (carved stone, Aztec, Mexico, a.d. 1479)

  CHAPTER I

  Emanations

  1. From Psychology to Metaphysics

  It is not difficult for the modern intellectual to concede that the symbolism of mythology has a psychological significance. Particularly after the work of the psychoanalysts, there can be little doubt, either that myths are of the nature of dream, or that dreams are symptomatic of the dynamics of the psyche. Sigmund Freud, Carl G. Jung, Wilhelm Stekel, Otto Rank, Karl Abraham, Géza Róheim, and many others have within the past few decades developed a vastly documented modern lore of dream and myth interpretation; and though the doctors differ among themselves, they are united into one great modern movement by a considerable body of common principles. With their discovery that the patterns and logic of fairy tale and myth correspond to those of dream, the long discredited chimeras of archaic man have returned dramatically to the foreground of modern consciousness.

  According to this view it appears that through the wonder tales — which pretend to describe the lives of the legendary heroes, the powers of the divinities of nature, the spirits of the dead, and the totem ancestors of the group — symbolic expression is given to the unconscious desires, fears, and tensions that underlie the conscious patterns of human behavior. Mythology, in other words, is psychology misread as biography, history, and cosmology. The modern psychologist can translate it back to its proper denotations and thus rescue for the contemporary world a rich and eloquent document of the profoundest depths of human character. Exhibited here, as in a fluoroscope, stand revealed the hidden processes of the enigma Homo sapiens — Occidental and Oriental, primitive and civilized, contemporary and archaic. The entire spectacle is before us. We have only to read it, study its constant patterns, analyze its variations, and therewith come to an understanding of the deep forces that have shaped man’s destiny and must continue to determine both our private and our public lives.

  But if we are to grasp the full value of the materials, we must note that myths are not exactly comparable to dream. Their figures originate from the same sources — the unconscious wells of fan­tasy — and their grammar is the same, but they are not the spontaneous products of sleep. On the contrary, their patterns are consciously controlled. And their understood function is to serve as a powerful picture language for the communication of traditional wisdom. This is true already of the so-called primitive folk mythologies. The trance-susceptible shaman and the initiated antelope-priest are not unsophisticated in the wisdom of the world, nor unskilled in the principles of communication by analogy. The metaphors by which they live, and through which they operate, have been brooded upon, searched, and discussed for centuries — even millennia; they have served whole societies, furthermore, as the mainstays of thought and life. The culture patterns have been shaped to them. The youth have been educated, and the aged rendered wise, through the study, experience, and understanding of their effective initiatory forms. For they actually touch and bring into play the vital energies of the whole human psyche. They link the unconscious to the fields of practical action, not irrationally, in the manner of a neurotic projection, but in such fashion as to permit a mature and sobering, practical comprehension of the fact-world to play back, as a stern control, into the realms of infantile wish and fear. And if this be true of the comparatively simple folk mythologies (the systems of myth and ritual by which the primitive hunting and fishing tribes support themselves), what may we say of such magnificent cosmic metaphors as those reflected in the great Homeric epics, the Divine Comedy of Dante, the Book of Genesis, and the timeless temples of the Orient? Until the most recent decades, these were the support of all human life and the inspiration of philosophy, poetry, and the arts. Where the inherited symbols have been touched by a Lao Tze, Buddha, Zoroaster, Christ, or Mohammed — employed by a consummate master of the spirit as a vehicle of the profoundest moral and metaphysical instruction — obviously we are in the presence rather of immense consciousness than of darkness.

  And so, to grasp the full value of the mythological figures that have come down to us, we must understand that they are not only symptoms of the unconscious (as indeed are all human thoughts and acts) but also controlled and intended statements of certain spiritual principles, which have remained as constant throughout the course of human history as the form and nervous structure of the human physique itself. Briefly formulated, the universal doctrine teaches that all the visible structures of the world — all things and beings — are the effects of a ubiquitous power out of which they rise, which supports and fills them during the period of their manifestation, and back into which they must ultimately dissolve. This is the power known to science as energy, to the Melanesians as mana, to the Sioux Indians as wakonda, the Hindus as Śakti, and the Christians as the power of God. Its manifestation in the psyche is termed, by the psychoanalysts, libido.[1] And its manifestation in the cosmos is the structure and flux of the universe itself.

  The recognition of the secondary nature of the pe
rsonality of whatever deity is worshiped is characteristic of most of the traditions of the world (see, for example, p. 155, note 154). In Christianity, Mohammedanism, and Judaism, however, the personality of the divinity is taught to be final — which makes it comparatively difficult for the members of these communions to understand how one may go beyond the limitations of their own anthropomorphic divinity. The result has been, on the one hand, a general obfuscation of the symbols, and on the other, a god-ridden bigotry such as is unmatched elsewhere in the history of religion. For a discussion of the possible origin of this aberration, see Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism.[3]

  The apprehension of the source of this undifferentiated yet everywhere particularized substratum of being is rendered frustrate by the very organs through which the apprehension must be accomplished. The forms of sensibility and the categories of human thought,[2] which are themselves manifestations of this power,* so confine the mind that it is normally impossible not only to see, but even to conceive, beyond the colorful, fluid, infinitely various and bewildering phenomenal spectacle. The function of ritual and myth is to make possible, and then to facilitate, the jump—by analogy. Forms and conceptions that the mind and its senses can comprehend are presented and arranged in such a way as to suggest a truth or openness beyond. And then, the conditions for meditation having been provided, the individual is left alone. Myth is but the penultimate; the ultimate is openness— that void, or being, beyond the categories which are themselves manifestations of this power,* — into which the mind must plunge alone and be dissolved. Therefore, God and the gods are only convenient means — themselves of the nature of the world of names and forms, though eloquent of, and ultimately conducive to, the ineffable. They are mere symbols to move and awaken the mind, and to call it past themselves.

  Heaven, hell, the mythological age, Olympus and all the other habitations of the gods are interpreted by psychoanalysis as symbols of the unconscious. The key to the modern systems of psychological interpretation therefore is this: the metaphysical realm = the unconscious. Correspondingly, the key to open the door the other way is the same equation in reverse: the unconscious = the metaphysical realm. “For,” as Jesus states it, “behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”[4] Indeed, the lapse of superconsciousness into the state of unconsciousness is precisely the meaning of the biblical image of the Fall. The constriction of consciousness, to which we owe the fact that we see not the source of the universal power but only the phenomenal forms reflected from that power, turns superconsciousness into unconsciousness and, at the same instant and by the same token, creates the world. Redemption consists in the return to superconsciousness and therewith the dissolution of the world. This is the great theme and formula of the cosmogonic cycle, the mythical image of the world’s coming to manifestation and subsequent return into the nonmanifest condition. Equally, the birth, life, and death of the individual may be regarded as a descent into unconsciousness and return. The hero is the one who, while still alive, knows and represents the claims of the superconsciousness which throughout creation is more or less unconscious. The adventure of the hero represents the moment in his life when he achieved illumination — the nuclear moment when, while still alive, he found and opened the road to the light beyond the dark walls of our living death.

  And so it is that the cosmic symbols are presented in a spirit of thought-bewildering sublime paradox. The kingdom of God is within, yet without, also; God, however, is but a convenient means to wake the sleeping princess, the soul. Life is her sleep, death the awakening. The hero, the waker of his own soul, is himself but the convenient means of his own dissolution. God, the waker of the soul, is therewith his own immediate death.

  Perhaps the most eloquent possible symbol of this mystery is that of the god crucified, the god offered, “himself to himself.”[5] Read in one direction, the meaning is the passage of the phenomenal hero into superconsciousness: the body with its five senses — like that of Prince Five-weapons stuck to Sticky-hair — is left hanging to the cross of the knowledge of life and death, pinned in five places (the two hands, the two feet, and the head crowned with thorns).[6] But also, God has descended voluntarily and taken upon himself this phenomenal agony. God assumes the life of man and man releases the God within himself at the mid-point of the cross-arms of the same “coincidence of opposites,”[7] the same sun door through which God descends and Man ascends — each as the other’s food.[8]

  The modern student may, of course, study these symbols as he will, either as a symptom of others’ ignorance, or as a sign to him of his own, either in terms of a reduction of metaphysics to psychology, or vice versa. The traditional way was to meditate on the symbols in both senses. In any case, they are telling metaphors of the destiny of man, man’s hope, man’s faith, and man’s dark mystery.

  2. The Universal Round

  As the consciousness of the individual rests on a sea of night into which it descends in slumber and out of which it mysteriously wakes, so, in the imagery of myth, the universe is precipitated out of, and reposes upon, a timelessness back into which it again dissolves. And as the mental and physical health of the individual depends on an orderly flow of vital forces into the field of waking day from the unconscious dark, so again in myth, the continuance of the cosmic order is assured only by a controlled flow of power from the source. The gods are symbolic personifications of the laws governing this flow. The gods come into existence with the dawn of the world and dissolve with the twilight. They are not eternal in the sense that the night is eternal. Only from the shorter span of human existence does the round of a cosmogonic eon seem to endure.

  The cosmogonic cycle is normally represented as repeating itself, world without end. During each great round, lesser dissolutions are commonly included, as the cycle of sleep and waking revolves throughout a lifetime. According to an Aztec version, each of the four elements — water, earth, air, and fire — terminates a period of the world: the eon of the waters ended in deluge, that of the earth with an earthquake, that of air with a wind, and the present eon will be destroyed by flame.[9]

  According to the Stoic doctrine of the cyclic conflagration, all souls are resolved into the world soul or primal fire. When this universal dissolution is concluded, the formation of a new universe begins (Cicero’s renovatio), and all things repeat themselves, every divinity, every person, playing again his former part. Seneca gave a description of this destruction in his “De Consolatione ad Marciam,” and appears to have looked forward to living again in the cycle to come.[10]

  A magnificent vision of the cosmogonic round is presented in the mythology of the Jains. The most recent prophet and savior of this very ancient Indian sect was Mahāvīra, a contemporary of the Buddha (sixth century b.c.). His parents were already followers of a much earlier Jaina savior-prophet, Pārśvanātha, who is represented with snakes springing from his shoulders and is reputed to have flourished 872–772 b.c. Centuries before Pārśvanātha, there lived and died the Jaina savior Neminātha, declared to have been a cousin of the beloved Hindu incarnation Kṛṣṇa. And before him, again, were exactly twenty-one others, going all the way back to Ṛṣabhanātha, who existed in an earlier age of the world, when men and women were always born in wedded couples, were two miles tall, and lived for a period of countless years. Ṛṣabhanātha instructed the people in the seventy-two sciences (writing, arithmetic, reading of omens, etc.), the sixty-four accomplishments of women (cooking, sewing, etc.), and the one hundred arts (pottery, weaving, painting, smithing, barbering, etc.); also, he introduced them to politics and established a kingdom.

  Before his day, such innovations would have been superfluous; for the people of the preceding period — who were four miles tall, with one hundred and twenty-eight ribs, enjoying a life span of two periods of countless years — were supplied in all their needs by ten “wish-fulfilling trees” (kalpa-vṛkṣa), which gave sweet fruits, leaves that were shaped like pots and pans, leaves that sweetly sang, leaves that
gave forth light at night, flowers delightful to see and to smell, food perfect both to sight and to taste, leaves that might serve as jewelry, and bark providing beautiful clothes. One of the trees was like a many-storied palace in which to live; another shed a gentle radiance, like that of many little lamps. The earth was sweet as sugar; the ocean as delicious as wine. And then again, before this happy age, there had been a period happier still — precisely twice as happy — when men and women had been eight miles tall, possessing each two hundred and fifty-six ribs. When those superlative people died, they passed directly to the world of the gods, without ever having heard of religion, for their natural virtue was as perfect as their beauty.

  The Jains conceive of time as an endless round. Time is pictured as a wheel with twelve spokes, or ages, classified in two sets of six. The first set is called the “descending” series (avasarpinī), and begins with the age of the superlative giant-couples. That paradisiac period endures for ten millions of ten millions of one hundred millions of one hundred million periods of countless years, and then yields slowly to the only half as blissful period when men and women are only four miles tall. In the third period — that of Ṛṣabhanātha, first of the twenty-four world saviors — happiness is mixed with a little sorrow, and virtue with a little vice. At the conclusion of this period, men and women are no longer born together in couples to live together as man and wife.

  During the fourth period, the gradual deterioration of the world and its inhabitants steadily continues. The life span and stature of man slowly diminish. Twenty-three world saviors are born; each restating the eternal doctrine of the Jains in terms appropriate to the conditions of his time. Three years, eight and one-half months after the death of the last of the saviors and prophets, Mahāvīra, this period comes to an end.