The Hero with a Thousand Faces

by Joseph Campbell

  Words impious, and insulting to high heaven,

  His earthly grandeur faded — then all tongues

  Grew clamorous and bold. The day of Jemshid

  Passed into gloom, his brightness all obscured.

  What said the Moralist? “When thou wert a king

  Thy subjects were obedient, but whoever

  Proudly neglects the worship of his God

  Brings desolation on his house and home.”

  — And when he marked the insolence of his people,

  He knew the wrath of heaven had been provoked,

  And terror overcame him.[21]

  Persian mythology is rooted in the common Indo-European system that was carried out of the Aral-Caspian steppes into India and Iran, as well as into Europe. The principal divinities of the earliest sacred writings (Avesta) of the Persians correspond very closely to those of the earliest Indian texts (Vedas). But the two branches came under greatly differing influences in their new homes, the Vedic tradition submitting gradually to Dravidian Indian forces, the Persian to Sumero-Babylonian.

  Early in the first millennium b.c., Persian belief was reorganized by the prophet Zarathustra (Zoroaster) according to a strict dualism of good and evil principles, light and dark, angels and devils. This crisis profoundly affected not only the Persian, but also the subject Hebrew beliefs, and thereby (centuries later) Christianity. It represents a radical departure from the more usual mythological interpretation of good and evil as effects proceeding from a unique source of being that transcends and reconciles all polarity.

  Persia was overrun by the zealots of Mohammed, a.d. 642. Those not converted were put to the sword. A poor remnant took refuge in India, where they survive to this day as the Parsis (“Persians”) of Bombay. After a period of some three centuries, however, a Mohammedan-Persian literary “Restoration” took place. The great names are: Firdausi (940–1020?), Omar Khayyam (?–1123?), Nizami (1140–1203), Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207–1273), Saadi (1184–1291), Hafiz (?–1389?), and Jami (1414–1492). Firdausi’s Shah Nameh (“Epic of Kings”) is a rehearsal in simple and stately narrative verse of the story of ancient Persia down to the Mohammedan conquest.

  No longer referring the boons of his reign to their transcendent source, the emperor breaks the stereoptic vision which it is his role to sustain. He is no longer the mediator between the two worlds. Man’s perspective flattens to include only the human term of the equation, and the experience of a supernal power immediately fails. The upholding idea of the community is lost. Force is all that binds it. The emperor becomes the tyrant ogre (Herod-Nimrod), the usurper from whom the world is now to be saved.

  Figure 74. Young Maize God (carved stone, Mayan, Honduras, c. a.d. 680–750)

  6. The Hero as World Redeemer

  Two degrees of initiation are to be distinguished in the mansion of the father. From the first the son returns as emissary, but from the second, with the knowledge that “I and the father are one.” Heroes of this second, highest illumination are the world redeemers, the so-called incarnations, in the highest sense. Their myths open out to cosmic proportions. Their words carry an authority beyond anything pronounced by the heroes of the scepter and the book.

  “All of you watch me. Don’t look around,” said the hero of the Jicarilla Apache, Killer-of-Enemies;

  Listen to what I say. The world is just as big as my body. The world is as large as my word. And the world is as large as my prayers. The sky is only as large as my words and prayers. The seasons are only as great as my body, my words, and my prayer. It is the same with the waters; my body, my words, my prayer are greater than the waters.

  Whoever believes me, whoever listens to what I say, will have long life. One who doesn’t listen, who thinks in some evil way, will have a short life.

  Don’t think I am in the east, south, west, or north. The earth is my body. I am there. I am all over. Don’t think I stay only under the earth or up in the sky, or only in the seasons, or on the other side of the waters. These are all my body. It is the truth that the underworld, the sky, the seasons, the waters, are all my body. I am all over.

  I have already given you that with which you have to make an offering to me. You have two kinds of pipe and you have the mountain tobacco.[22]

  The work of the incarnation is to refute by his presence the pretensions of the tyrant ogre. The latter has occluded the source of grace with the shadow of his limited personality; the incarnation, utterly free of such ego-consciousness, is a direct manifestation of the law. On a grandiose scale he enacts the hero-life — performs the hero-deeds, slays the monster — but it is all with the freedom of a work done only to make evident to the eye what might have been accomplished equally well with a mere thought.

  Kans, the cruel uncle of Kṛṣṇa, usurper of his own father’s throne in the city of Mathurā, heard a voice one day that said to him: “Thy enemy is born, thy death is certain.” Kṛṣṇa and his elder brother Balarāma had been spirited to the cowherds from their mother’s womb to protect them from this Indian counterpart of Nimrod. And he had sent demons after them — Pūtanā of the poison milk was the first — but all had been undone. Now when his devices had failed, Kans determined to lure the youths to his city. A messenger was sent to invite the cowherds to a sacrifice and great tournament. The invitation was accepted. With the brothers among them, the cowherds came and camped outside the city wall.

  Kṛṣṇa and Balarāma, his brother, went in to see the wonders of the town. There were great gardens, palaces, and groves. They encountered a washerman and asked him for some fine clothes; when he laughed and refused, they took the clothes by force and made themselves very gay. Then a hump-backed woman prayed Kṛṣṇa to let her rub sandal-paste on his body. He went up to her, placing his feet on hers, and with two fingers beneath her chin, lifted her up and made her straight and fair. And he said: “When I have slain Kans I shall come back and be with you.”

  The brothers came to the empty stadium. There the bow of the god Śiva was set up, huge as three palm trees, great and heavy. Kṛṣṇa advanced to the bow, pulled it, and it broke with a mighty noise. Kans in his palace heard the sound and was appalled.

  The tyrant sent his troops to kill the brothers in the city. But the lads slew the soldiers and returned to their camp. They told the cowherds they had had an interesting tour, then ate their suppers, and went to bed.

  Kans that night had ominous dreams. When he woke, he ordered the stadium prepared for the tournament and the trumpets blown for assembly. Kṛṣṇa and Balarāma arrived as jugglers, followed by the cowherds, their friends. When they entered the gate, there was a furious elephant ready to crush them, mighty as ten thousand common elephants. The driver rode it directly at Kṛṣṇa. Balarāma gave it such a blow with his fist that it halted, started back. The driver rode it again, but the two brothers struck it to the ground, and it was dead.

  The youths walked onto the field. Everybody saw what his own nature revealed to him: the wrestlers thought Kṛṣṇa a wrestler, the women thought him the treasure of beauty, the gods knew him as their lord, and Kans thought he was Māra, Death himself. When he had undone every one of the wrestlers sent against him, slaying finally the strongest, he leapt to the royal dais, dragged the tyrant by the hair, and killed him. Men, gods, and saints were delighted, but the king’s wives came forth to mourn. Kṛṣṇa, seeing their grief, comforted them with his primal wisdom: “Mother,” he said, “do not grieve. No one can live and not die. To imagine oneself as possessing anything is to be mistaken; nobody is father, mother, or son. There is only the continuous round of birth and death.”[23]

  The legends of the redeemer describe the period of desolation as caused by a moral fault on the part of man (Adam in the garden, Jemshid on the throne). Yet from the standpoint of the cosmogonic cycle, a regular alternation of fair and foul is characteristic of the spectacle of time. Just as in the history of the universe, so also in that of nations: emanation leads to dissolution, youth t
o age, birth to death, form-creative vitality to the dead weight of inertia. Life ­surges, precipitating forms, and then ebbs, leaving jetsam behind. The golden age, the reign of the world emperor, alternates, in the pulse of every moment of life, with the waste land, the reign of the tyrant. The god who is the creator becomes the destroyer in the end.

  From this point of view the tyrant ogre is no less representative of the father than the earlier world emperor whose position he usurped, or than the brilliant hero (the son) who is to supplant him. He is the representative of the set-fast, as the hero is the carrier of the changing. And since every moment of time bursts free from the fetters of the moment before, so this dragon, Holdfast, is pictured as of the generation immediately preceding that of the savior of the world.

  Stated in direct terms: the work of the hero is to slay the tenacious aspect of the father (dragon, tester, ogre king) and release from its ban the vital energies that will feed the universe.

  This can be done either in accordance with the Father’s will or against his will; he [the Father] may “choose death for his children’s sake,” or it may be that the Gods impose the passion upon him, making him their sacrificial victim. These are not contradictory doctrines, but different ways of telling one and the same story; in reality, Slayer and Dragon, sacrificer and victim, are of one mind behind the scenes, where there is no polarity of contraries, but mortal enemies on the stage, where the everlasting war of the Gods and the Titans is displayed. In any case, the Dragon-Father remains a Pleroma, no more diminished by what he exhales than he is increased by what he repossesses. He is the Death, on whom our life depends; and to the question “Is Death one, or many?” the answer is made that “He is one as he is there, but many as he is in his children here.”[24]

  The hero of yesterday becomes the tyrant of tomorrow, unless he crucifies himself today.

  From the point of view of the present there is such a recklessness in this deliverance of the future that it appears to be nihilistic. The words of Kṛṣṇa, the world savior, to the wives of the dead Kans carry a frightening overtone; so do the words of Jesus: “I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”[25] To protect the unprepared, mythology veils such ultimate revelations under half-obscuring guises, while yet insisting on the gradually instructive form. The savior figure who eliminates the tyrant father and then himself assumes the crown is (like Oedipus) stepping into his sire’s stead. To soften the harsh patricide, the legend represents the father as some cruel uncle or usurping Nimrod. Nevertheless, the half-hidden fact remains. Once it is glimpsed, the entire spectacle buckles: the son slays the father, but the son and the father are one. The enigmatical figures dissolve back into the primal chaos. This is the wisdom of the end (and rebeginning) of the world.

  7. The Hero as Saint

  Before we proceed to the last episode of the life, one more hero-type remains to be mentioned: the saint or ascetic, the world-renouncer.

  Endowed with a pure understanding, restraining the self with firmness, turning away from sound and other objects, and abandoning love and hatred; dwelling in solitude, eating but little, controlling the speech, body, and mind, ever engaged in meditation and concentration, and cultivating freedom from passion; forsaking conceit and power, pride and lust, wrath and possessions, tranquil in heart, and free from ego — he becomes worthy of becoming one with the imperishable.[26]

  The pattern is that of going to the father, but to the unmanifest rather than the manifest aspect: taking the step that the Bodhisattva renounced: that from which there is no return. Not the paradox of the dual perspective, but the ultimate claim of the unseen is here intended. The ego is burnt out. Like a dead leaf in a breeze, the body continues to move about the earth, but the soul has dissolved already in the ocean of bliss.

  Thomas Aquinas, as the result of a mystical experience while celebrating mass in Naples, put his pen and ink on the shelf and left the last chapters of his Summa Theologica to be completed by another hand. “My writing days,” he stated, “are over; for such things have been revealed to me that all I have written and taught seems of but small account to me, wherefore I hope in my God, that, even as the end has come to my teaching, so it may soon come in my life.” Shortly thereafter, in his forty-ninth year, he died.

  Beyond life, these heroes are beyond the myth also. Neither do they treat of it anymore, nor can the myth properly treat of them. Their legends are rehearsed, but the pious sentiments and lessons of the biographies are necessarily inadequate; little better than bathos. They have stepped away from the realm of forms, into which the incarnation descends and in which the Bodhisattva remains, the realm of the manifest profile of The Great Face. Once the hidden profile has been discovered, myth is the penultimate, silence the ultimate, word. The moment the spirit passes to the hidden, silence alone remains.

  Figure 75. Oedipus Plucking Out His Eyes (detail; carved stone, Roman, Italy, c. second–third century a.d.)

  King Oedipus came to know that the woman he had married was his mother, the man he had slain his father; he plucked his eyes out and wandered in penance over the earth. The Freudians declare that each of us is slaying his father, marrying his mother, all the time — only unconsciously: the roundabout symbolic ways of doing this and the rationalizations of the consequent compulsive activity constitute our individual lives and common civilization. Should the feelings chance to become aware of the real import of the world’s acts and thoughts, one would know what Oedipus knew: the flesh would suddenly appear to be an ocean of self-violation. This is the sense of the legend of Pope Gregory the Great, born of incest, living in incest. Aghast, he flees to a rock in the sea, and there does penance for his very life.

  The tree has now become the cross: the White Youth sucking milk has become the Crucified swallowing gall. Corruption crawls where before was the blossom of spring. Yet beyond this threshold of the cross — for the cross is a way (the sun door), not an end — is beatitude in God.

  He has placed his seal upon me that I may prefer no love to Him.

  The winter has passed; the turtle dove sings; the vineyards burst into blossom.

  With His own ring my Lord Jesus Christ has wed me, and crowned me with a crown as His bride.

  The robe with which the Lord has clothed me is a robe of splendor with gold interwove, and the necklace with which He had adorned me is beyond all price.[27]

  8. Departure of the Hero

  The last act in the biography of the hero is that of the death or departure. Here the whole sense of the life is epitomized. Needless to say, the hero would be no hero if death held for him any terror; the first condition is reconciliation with the grave.

  While sitting under the oak of Mamre, Abraham perceived a flashing of light and a smell of sweet odor, and turning around he saw Death coming toward him in great glory and beauty. And Death said unto Abraham: “Think not, Abraham, that this beauty is mine, or that I come thus to every man. Nay, but if any one is righteous like thee, I thus take a crown and come to him, but if he is a sinner, I come in great corruption, and out of their sins I make a crown for my head, and I shake them with great fear, so that they are dismayed.” Abraham said to him, “And art thou, indeed, he that is called Death?” He answered, and said, “I am the bitter name,” but Abraham answered, “I will not go with thee.” And Abraham said to Death, “Show us thy corruption.” And Death revealed his corruption, showing two heads, the one had the face of a serpent, the other head was like a sword. All the servants of Abraham, looking at the fierce mien of Death, died, but Abraham prayed to the Lord, and he raised them up. As the looks of Death were not able to cause Abraham’s soul to depart from him, God removed the soul of Abraham as in a dream, and the arch
angel Michael took it up into heaven. After great praise and glory had been given to the Lord by the angels who brought Abraham’s soul, and after Abraham bowed down to worship, then came the voice of God, saying thus: “Take My friend Abraham into Paradise, where are the tabernacles of My righteous ones and the abodes of My saints Isaac and Jacob in his bosom, where there is no trouble, nor grief, nor sighing, but peace and rejoicing and life unending.”[28]

  Compare the following dream:

  I was on a bridge where I met a blind fiddler. Everyone was tossing coins into his hat. I came closer and perceived that the musician was not blind. He had a squint, and was looking at me with a crooked glance from the side. Suddenly, there was a little old woman sitting at the side of a road. It was dark and I was afraid. “Where does this road lead?” I thought. A young peasant came along the road and took me by the hand. “Do you want to come home,” he said, “and drink coffee?” “Let me go! You are holding too tight!” I cried, and awoke.[29]

  The hero, who in his life represented the dual perspective, after his death is still a synthesizing image: like Charlemagne, he sleeps only and will arise in the hour of destiny, or he is among us under another form.

  The Aztecs tell of the feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl, monarch of the ancient city of Tollan in the golden age of its prosperity. He was the teacher of the arts, originator of the calendar, and the giver of maize. He and his people were overcome, at the close of their time, by the stronger magic of an invading race, the Aztecs. Tezcatlipoca, the warrior-hero of the younger people and their era, broke the city of Tollan; and the feathered serpent, king of the golden age, burned his dwellings behind him, buried his treasures in the mountains, transformed his chocolate trees into mesquite, commanded the multi-colored birds, his servants, to fly before him, and departed in great sorrow. And he came to a city called Quauhtitlan, where there was a tree, very tall and large; and he went over to the tree, sat down beneath it, and gazed into a mirror that was brought to him. “I am old,” he said; and the place was named “The old Quauhtitlan.” Resting again at another place along the way, and looking back in the direction of his Tollan, he wept, and his tears went through a rock. He left in that place the mark of his sitting and the impress of his palms. He was met and challenged, further along, by a group of necromancers, who prohibited him from proceeding until he had left with them the knowledge of working silver, wood, and feathers, and the art of painting. As he crossed the mountains, all of his attendants, who were dwarfs and humpbacks, died of cold. At another place he encountered his antagonist, Tezcatlipoca, who defeated him at a game of ball. At still another he aimed with an arrow at a large póchotl tree; the arrow too was an entire póchotl tree; so that when he shot it through the first they formed a cross. And so he passed along, leaving many signs and place-names behind him, until, coming at last to the sea, he departed on a raft of serpents. It is not known how he arrived at his destination, Tlapállan, his original home.[30]