The Hero with a Thousand Faces

After trials comes the hero’s marriage with “the Queen Goddess of the World” (109). The Prince of the Lonesome Isle and the Lady of Tubber Tintye story, an Irish folk tale, sees the prince passing through many exciting trials and a castle filled with sleeping monsters and beautiful slumbering maidens. Finally, he beholds the beautiful Queen of Tubber Tintye sleeping beside a well of fire, and the prince lies down to sleep nearby. Like Briar-rose and Brynhild, the sleeping woman in mythology is “the reply to all desire, the bliss-bestowing goal of every hero’s earthly and unearthly quest” (109-11). She represents a return to childhood peace with one’s mother and a future of belonging, love, and perfection that recalls the timeless bliss of infancy.

Bad mothers fill mythology as well, whether they are negligent, cruel, clinging, or Oedipally desired (111). Campbell retells the ancient Roman myth of Actaeon and Diana, the classical goddess who is like the distant mother and appears in the Metamorphoses. While out in the forest hunting, Actaeon spies Diana bathing in a secret grove. Diana sees Actaeon and transforms him into a stag as punishment. Actaeon’s own hounds devour him in his new form.

The “Universal Mother” speaks to humanity’s relationship with the cosmos, the world of matter that is often perceived as “nourishing and protecting” (113). The Hindu goddess Kali is this universal mother, as she is the source of all life and all death. Worshippers acknowledge this duality with an expectation that Kali is neither good nor evil, rather the symbol of being. According to various scriptures, her dwelling is surrounded by trees that grant wishes and fountains with the “nectar of immortality” (114), while she wears human heads around her neck, and one of her hands holds a sword covered with blood. Encompassing these opposites, she is called “The Ferry across the Ocean of Existence” (115). Campbell references a story from the Hindu mystic Ramakrishna, who observes a woman giving birth to a baby, eating it, and diving into the Ganges River. Campbell states that many are not ready to see the goddess in her full power.

The woman symbolizes the spectrum of knowledge of the cosmos. In myth, she suggests what the hero has not yet discovered and leads the hero in stages toward complete knowledge. To the hero who understands her and treats her with respect, she might grant godhood.

In the Irish tale of King Eochaid’s sons (quoted from Silva Gadelica), each of the five princes encounters a frightening old woman at a well. She asks each for a kiss in exchange for water, but four of them refuse. The final prince, Niall, accepts, kisses her, and finds her changed into a beautiful young woman whose name is Royal Ruler. She represents rule: ugly at the outset but beautiful when won. Like Niall, the hero must possess inner virtue to gain access to the well of the goddess. Thereby will he attain the gift of love as a reward for his quest.

When the hero of a myth is female, however, she often becomes the lover of a god. Campbell continues, “And if she has shunned him, the scales fall from her eyes; if she has sought him, her desire finds its peace” (119). Campbell returns to an earlier chapter and the Arapaho legend of the girl pursuing a porcupine up a very tall tree. The porcupine, in fact, is a divine young man who lures her into the sky so he can take her as his wife.

Campbell continues the opening fairy tale of Section 1, in which the beautiful princess abandons the frog with the golden ball. The frog arrives at the castle to receive his reward: being the princess’s constant companion. He is revealed to be a prince in disguise, and the two marry thereafter. Psyche, after her trials, receives the gift of immortality from Jupiter to be with Cupid forever. Certain Christian sects also recognize a marriage between the Virgin Mary and God.

If the goddess is the totality of all knowledge, the hero’s marriage to her symbolizes “total mastery of life” (120). If she is the mother of life and death, he is now the father.

Campbell acknowledges how fantastical this might sound but cautions the reader to remember this journey as a symbology of ordinary human life. Confronting the journey’s key points can lead to self-discovery and a conquering of personal monsters that inhibit people’s passage along their course. Without this knowledge, one will remain ignorant and therefore incapable of moving past obstacles. He suggests that this journey might be engaged through psychoanalysis, with the analyst as a supernatural guide. People rarely see their problems as they are; rather, they misinterpret situations and blame others. Their problems often lie in their self-seeking flesh, which is far less preferable to “the pure, the pure, pure soul” (122).

Campbell quotes Hamlet and considers how, like Oedipus, Shakespeare’s famous title character must fight past incest and lust and seek a less tainted realm beyond. He writes, “No longer can the hero rest in innocence with the goddess of the flesh; for she is become the queen of sin” (123). Campbell finds precedent for this way of thinking in the writings of the Hindu monk Shankaracharya and stories of the Christian saints Peter and Bernard of Clairvaux.

According to the writer Jacobus de Voragine, Saint Peter prays for his beautiful daughter Petronilla to remain ill so that no man will come near her. Once restored to health and devoted to God, Petronilla delays an inquiring suitor and perishes in her bed. The same text depicts how Bernard of Clairvaux is tempted many times by beautiful women throughout his life, but he turns each one away. A woman who hosts Bernard in her home tries to enter his bed at night, but he cries out that there is a thief each of the three times she approaches him. He does this deliberately to protect his chastity and becomes a monk soon thereafter.

These temptations are familiar mythological patterns about saints and monks who remain chaste but are still vulnerable to lust. In a quote by the American Cotton Mather, he describes the wilderness of the world as beset by devils at every corner on the sojourner’s way to heaven.

Campbell opens this section with the image of the great, fearsome father as described by Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards, who depicted God as a bowman ready to send an arrow at humans who will be “made drunk with your Blood” (126) in Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Furthermore, the sins of man, according to Edwards, cause the streams of God’s wrath to rise ever higher, and if he would unleash them, no one would survive. Edwards further uses fire imagery to depict the plight of man as a helpless spider with “nothing to keep off the Flames of Wrath” (127). It is only by God’s mercy that he protects sinful, unredeemed man from damnation.

This grace coexists with eternal destruction in many world myths, including that of the Hindu god Shiva, who assures people not to fear death. Typically, people have sacraments, amulets, and/or supernatural guides to assuage their fears in the face of death. In fact, the fearful God is the father image maintained since infancy, and the opposing forces of God and sin are projections of the superego and the id, in the terminology of psychoanalysis. To escape this fear, a person must detach from the ego and trust in the father’s mercy. This is achieved through faith in the mother figure, like the Spider Woman or the Universal Mother, who is the mirror image of the father.

Campbell returns to the myth of the Twin Warriors of the Navaho (cited in Part 1, Chapter 1). The young men, protected by the charms of the Spider Woman, pass through the treacherous landscape unscathed. They enter their father’s heavenly house, where two women cover the men and hide them on a shelf. The bearer of the sun, their father, finds them in their hiding place and throws them four times each in the four compass directions. He places them in a sweat lodge to endure the heat. They survive, and the Sun gives them a poisonous pipe to smoke, which they also endure. The Twin Warriors survive each trial and finally reconcile with their father.

Ovid’s story of Phaëthon and his father Phoebus resembles this model. Phaëthon travels to find his father, who drives the sun across the horizon every day in a fiery chariot. Phoebus offers Phaëthon anything he wants, and the son asks to drive his father’s chariot. Although Phoebus protests, he reluctantly grants his son’s request and gives him detailed instructions on how to drive the chariot. However, Phaëthon cannot control the horses and sets heaven and earth aflame as the chariot escapes his control. Jove must destroy the chariot and kill Phaëthon to prevent further damage.

This tale depicts a father’s failure to instruct a child in the ways of adulthood, which is his traditional role. As children grow, the son competes with the father for “mastery of the universe, and the daughter against the mother to be the mastered world” (136). To achieve this mastery of the universe, the hero must be rid of childish self-interest and pass through his initiation with an enlightened view of life.

Campbell cites excerpts from dreamers, one a little boy who is eaten by cannonballs, the other a father who cooks and eats his baby. This “ogre father” (137) image recurs in the circumcision rituals of the Murngin tribe in Australia, as referenced in the Prologue. The Great Father Snake is said to emerge from his hole, and the men of the tribe take the boys from their mothers to initiate them into the mythology of their people.

Another Australian tribe, the Arunta, conducts a circumcision ritual during the evening, in which the boy is placed on a shield that is balanced on a man’s head, and the air fills with the cries of bull-roarers. These rituals demonstrate both Oedipal vengefulness and the sacrificial kindness of the father, who provides his blood for his son to drink during some initiation rites. In a quoted passage from Dr. Geza Róheim, these boys are commanded to remain still, blindfolded, and made to drink their elders’ blood without revulsion or else they or their families will die. At times the older men faint or are killed to enact the ritual, making literal “the killing and eating of the primal father” (141), according to Róheim.

These rituals bear the same imprints as modern mythologies as well. It is a call to rebirth. Many gods from world mythologies, such as Osiris, Mithra, and Attis, die and rise again. Rituals like the Whitsuntide Louts fete these transformations. The sacraments associated with these rituals lead people through the second birth into greater knowledge of their humanity.

A Basumbwa folk story from East Africa tells how a father leads his son into a burrow where the son meets the Great Chief, Death. Half lovely, half foul, the chief is surrounded by servants who tend to his ugly side. Death speaks a pervasive curse over people that day. The next day, the servants tend to Death’s lovely side, and he speaks a blessing over people. The father tells the son he was the unfortunate recipient of Death’s curse the first day and will live a poor man.

This image of Death is like other myths that present a god both wonderful and fearsome, such as the trickster-god Edshu described in the Prologue. Likewise, the god Viracocha from Peruvian mythology possesses ultimate power but travels the world as a beggar. Gods in disguise frequently recur throughout world mythologies as well. Viracocha also encompasses light and darkness in the form of the sun and the storm, like Yahweh of Hebrew scriptures and the father of the Twin Warriors of the Navaho. Life and death, then, flow from the same source and possess the same power.

Viracocha’s representation also contains tears that supply water to the world. This image presents the god as moved by human suffering and bidden to keep supplying life. The eternal has created a world of time, and it is at that point of mystery that the hero must find the answer to the questions that began his journey. He must face fear and continue to enlightenment, in which suffering is “validated in the majesty of Being” (147).

The biblical figure Job, along with his family and servants, endures senseless suffering at the permission of God. When he and God speak, the Lord challenges Job to compare his humanity with divine power and justice. Job is forever changed by these words, which do not explain his sufferings, yet he is humbled and awestruck. He receives a new home, family, and servants. This myth shows a hero who understands the divine father and welcomes his presence.

Mahayana Buddhism counts Avalokiteshvara, “The Lord Looking Down in Pity” (149) referenced in several ancient texts, among its most precious Bodhisattvas. Many pray to this god for his compassion, which he pledged as a man before he attained enlightenment. He promises to hear every prayer. The hero aspires to this godlike stature: enlightened, bold, and free. Avalokiteshvara holds the world as a lotus in one of his many hands and is clothed with light and many brilliant colors. This deity is also represented as female in Chinese and Japanese Buddhist temples (as Kwan Yin and Kwannon, respectively). The Bodhisattva represents the boundary between time and eternity, which are dual forms of the same phenomenon.

Other gods, such as Awonawilona of the Native American Zuni tribe or the principles of Yang and Yin in Chinese mythology, are also depicted as both male and female. In the biblical account of creation, woman was divided from man as a first departure from perfect wholeness. This is followed by the entrance of sin and humanity’s exile from the Garden of Eden. The perfection of eternity gives way to the ravages of time, a theme echoed in many other myths. The monomyth ends with the hero restoring Paradise and communion with the divine.

Campbell lists other representations of figures from mythology with male and female characteristics, including the prophet Tiresias from the story of Oedipus, the Hindu gods Shiva and Shakti occupying one body, and Australian boys from tribal cultures whose penises are cut to create a womb-like opening on the underside. Later, the men must reopen these incisions, creating a menstrual-like flow that suggests a motherly, nurturing power.

Campbell returns to psychoanalytic theory: “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” (155). This creates not only personal but public hostility through the constant warfare of humankind. Within communities, older men must diffuse younger men’s Oedipal hostilities toward them and divert them to other communities seen as enemies. This manifests in a failed sublimation of the ego, which now attaches personal value to the maintenance of the home community and rejects the opportunity to love those of other communities.

Christian communities in particular engage in such hostility. They wage wars despite the Gospels’ words on self-sacrifice and the mandate to “Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you” (157). Campbell asserts that this kind of division is needless, for God bestows love on everyone. He recommends that Christian sects cease arguing over the particulars of ritual and acknowledge the democratic spirit of biblical teaching.

To understand the purpose of a great world religion, Campbell asserts, one must investigate the peaceful doctrine of Buddhism (159). In Buddhist teaching, every animal and man holds “The Lord Looking Down in Pity” in its core, emptiness made manifest. To be free, mankind must acknowledge that this deity lives inside every person, even the supposed enemy. New birth comes in part as an acknowledgement of the shared life in all beings through the power of the Bodhisattva, which takes death’s power away. The father may eat and scatter the body of the hero, but the hero is reborn, awakened to the commonality of all beings and shedding the duality of good and evil.

In the figure of the Bodhisattva, the Meeting with the Goddess and the Atonement with the Father become one story. This figure also represents a refutation of the divide between life and death, since Avalokiteshvara refuses to enter Nirvana. The urges of the flesh tempt this hero, like all heroes, as he crosses the final threshold into enlightenment. This teaching mirrors the Western traditions of psychoanalysis, which locate in every person a “life-wish” and “death-wish” (164).

Campbell distinguishes between psychoanalysis, which aims to liberate those who suffer psychologically into a more ordinary life, and the myth of religion. Religion rejects ordinary life and takes heroes into a place where their desire, hostility, and delusion can be extracted altogether. The mechanism of this transformation can be understood through the Eightfold Path of Buddhism.

The Bodhisattva does not reject ordinary life, however, yet understands the inner enlightenment and the outer cosmos as one entity (165). He understands emptiness and form as one. The hero who follows this path will develop compassion for others and embody selfless emptiness. Anyone who has attained this knowledge of the oneness of all things and the indwelling of divine eternity has achieved immortality. Certain Eastern traditions represent these meditating figures surrounded by resplendent flora and fauna. Hsi Wang Mu is a Chinese goddess who dwells in a castle of gems and gold and serves an incredible feast at her table.

Likewise, Japanese tea ceremonies reflect paradise on earth through formalized, spare arrangement of objects, movements, and contemplation. The experience creates an opportunity to reflect on existence, beauty, and eternity. Even the landscape in environments like Japan and South America speak to eternity. This is illustrated through a Hindu myth about an ascetic who rests his feet on a lingam, or symbol of the god Shiva, beside the Ganges River. A priest rebukes him and attempts to move the ascetic’s feet to a place without a lingam, but lingams sprout from the ground wherever the man moves his feet.

Campbell returns to the import of the Bodhisattva: The god’s androgyny symbolizes his fusing of eternity and time. In the hero’s journey, the hero resides in the womb of life, separated from the father, but returns to him at death and thus enjoys eternity. The father and mother in this case, symbolic of time and eternity, are one. Tibetan images of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas often portray this union literally as figures with both male and female characteristics.

Religious sayings such as “the Word was made flesh” in Christian writings and “the Jewel is in the Lotus” (171) in Buddhist tradition picture this meeting of the opposites and provide the occasion for a bell ringing in a temple, symbolizing eternity.

Campbell returns to the myth of the Prince of the Lonesome Island and the Queen of Tubber Tintye from Section 2. After the Prince sleeps next to the queen for six days and six nights, he wakes up and pours water from the magic well into three bottles. He eats a feast of ever-replenishing food on a golden table. Then he writes a letter informing the queen of his stay at the castle, places it under her head, and goes on his way.

Campbell concludes that the simple accomplishment of these tasks proves that the prince is “a born king” (173). Further, the World Navel can be found in the image of the flaming well of Tubber Tintye with the water as its life force. The whole castle is asleep and threatens to undo the hero, just as the dream world threatens to undo the dreamer. The golden table is another common symbol of a feast of gods.

These common images are psychological symbols that mount defenses against a frightening world as early as infancy. The infant, afraid of being destroyed, seeks physical safety and manifests various fantasies when her mother weans her. Certain Australian cultures assuage the latent infant desire for protection by stating that stones and other objects have replaced the medicine man’s internal organs.

This figuration depicts the medicine man as indestructible, just as stories about doubles do. Campbell cites a folk tale in which an ogre’s double is an egg found on an obscure island which, should one break it, would also kill the ogre. A modern dreamer reports seeing herself diving for jewels in water, and in a Hindu myth a woman bids her suitor to find her double. In Australia, a man’s double is a carved block of wood.

An indestructible body finds its home in paradise, where the hero can feast. This image can be found on the Greek Mount Olympus and its feasts of ambrosia, the Irish myth of Tuatha De Danaan, Persian gods drinking liquor from the tree of life, and Japanese gods drinking sake.

As these common myths arise from our unconscious, the stories feel familiar, but their limitation is also that of the audience: a resistance to engaging in the true tests the stories represent. Campbell recounts a Hindu myth from the Ramayana about the fight for immortality between the titans and gods. After the titans receive the ability to raise their dead, the gods call a truce, in which time both parties will churn a mystical ocean for immortal butter called Amrita. The power of death arises from the churning in the form of Kalakuta, which Shiva drinks and holds in his throat. Powerful beings arise from the Milky Ocean where the churning takes place. One is the divine physician who holds the nectar of immortality in the form of the moon. Vishnu distracts the titans by transforming into a beautiful damsel and holding the moon-cup of Amrita. He and his fellow gods defeat the titans and consume Amrita.

Stories of the gods are meant to provide not dogma but a portal to enlightenment, in which existence can be seen as ephemeral. Tantric, Tibetan Buddhism and psychoanalytic thought all share the theory that the gods are more symbolic than literal. The god is not the hero’s goal; rather, their immortality and enlightenment is the goal. Sometimes, like Prometheus, the hero must trick the god to gain these boons.

In the excerpted Polynesian myth of Maui and Mahu-ika, the god of fire, the bold Maui challenges the god to a tossing match. Mahu-ika tosses the hero again and again while chanting. The two trade places, with Maui tossing the god and chanting. Then Maui speaks a spell for Mahu-ika to fall on his head and perish. Maui then possesses the god’s head and the gift of fire.

Likewise, the hero Gilgamesh of the Mesopotamian flood story pursues the watercress of eternal life through a series of trials. When he meets the goddess Ishtar in her cave, she reminds him of life’s pleasures to dissuade him from his quest. Gilgamesh continues to the ferryman Ursanapi and kills his guards before embarking on the journey across the water of death. Gilgamesh arrives at the land of the gods, and the god Utnapishtim greets him with a long story and an enchanted sleep. The ferryman warns Gilgamesh of the dangers of the watercress, which the hero plucks from the floor of the cosmic sea. Gilgamesh bathes and falls asleep after his conquest, and a snake comes to steal the watercress from him.

Gilgamesh has many successors, both literal and literary, who have pursued immortality on earth. Immortality of the body was never the ultimate goal, however, rather a transcendent immortality of the spirit, which resides in the hero already. Campbell quotes the Taoist Lao-tse’s Tao Teh King: “To know eternity is enlightenment, and not to recognize eternity brings disorder and evil” (189). Many who converse with gods do not comprehend that they may seek enlightenment and so ask for earthly blessings that will pass away. This is illustrated by the Greeks’ King Midas, who asks for a golden touch that ruins his food and possessions and turns his daughter into a statue.

Each person’s journey involves straining past personal demons toward a cosmic deity who can show them emptiness and substance. Dante, like other heroes, receives this revelation in the form of pure light at the finale of The Divine Comedy. This nameless force undoes the division between hero and god, which are part of this “font of life” (191). In Germanic myth, the god Othin is crucified to share knowledge of this font with others, whereas the Buddha undergoes his trials beneath the Bo Tree for the same boon. Although this act is destructive, it is also renewing for both people and creation as a whole. Campbell concludes by citing a text from the Jataka, in which the world celebrates with banners, flags, fruit, blossoms, and physical healings after the Buddha’s great victory.