The Hero with a Thousand Faces

[118] Evans-Wentz, “Hymn of Milarepa in praise of his teacher,” p. 137.

[119] The same idea is frequently expressed in the Upaniṣads: viz., “This self gives itself to that self, that self gives itself to this self. Thus they gain each other. In this form he gains yonder world, in that form he experiences this world” (Aitareya Aranyaka, 2. 3. 7). It is known also to the mystics of Islam: “Thirty years the transcendent God was my mirror, now I am my own mirror; i.e., that which I was I am no more, the transcendent God is his own mirror. I say that I am my own mirror; ’tis God that speaks with my tongue, and I have vanished” (Bayazid, as cited in The Legacy of Islam, T.W. Arnold and A. Guillaume, editors, Oxford Press, 1931, p. 216).

[120] “I came forth from Bayazid-ness as a snake from its skin. Then I looked. I saw that lover, beloved, and love are one, for in the world of unity all can be one” (Bayazid, loc. cit.).

[121] Book of Hosea, 6:1–3.

[122] Bṛhadāranyaka Upaniṣad, 1. 4. 3. See below.

[123] Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism (New York: The Philosophical Library, no date), p. 63.

[124] Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (translated by James Strachey; Standard Edition, XVIII; London: The Hogarth Press, 1955). See also Karl Menninger, Love against Hate, p. 262.

[125] Vajracchedikā Sūtra, 32; see “Sacred Books of the East,” op cit., p. 144.

[126] The smaller Prajñāpāramitā Hṛdāya Sūtra; Ibid., p. 153.

[127] Nagarjuna, Madhyamika Shastra.

“What is immortal and what is mortal are harmoniously blended, for they are not one, nor are they separate” (Ashvaghosha).

“This view,” writes Dr. Coomaraswamy, citing these texts, “is expressed with dramatic force in the aphorism Yas klésas so bodhi, yas samsāras tat nirvānum, ‘That which is sin is also Wisdom, the realm of Becoming is also Nirvana’” (Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916, p. 245).

[128] Bhagavad Gītā, 6:29, 6:31.

This represents the perfect fulfillment of what Evelyn Underhill termed “the goal of the Mystic Way: the True Unitive Life: the state of Divine Fecundity: Deification” (op. cit., passim). Underhill, however, like Professor Toynbee, makes the popular mistake of supposing that this ideal is peculiar to Christianity. “It is safe to say,” writes Professor Salmony, “that Occidental judgment has been falsified, up to the present, by the need for self-assertion” (Alfred Salmony, “Die Rassenfrage in der Indienforschung,” Sozialistische Monatshefte, 8, Berlin, 1926, p. 534).

[129] Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism, p. 74.

[130] See E.T.C. Werner, A Dictionary of Chinese Mythology (Shanghai, 1932), p. 163.

[131] See Okakura Kakuzo, The Book of Tea (New York, 1906). See also Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism (London, 1927), and Lafcadio Hearn, Japan (New York, 1904). [See also Campbell’s exploration of the symbolism of the tea ceremony in Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal, edited by David Kudler (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2003), pp. 133–36. — Ed.]

[132] Morris Edward Opler, Myths and Tales of the Jicarilla Apache Indians (Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, vol. XXXI, 1938), p. 110.

[133] Compare to the Chinese concept of yin-yang.

[134] See above.

[135] See above.

[136] See Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, pp. 210–14.

[137] Compare the drum of creation in the hand of the Hindu Dancing Śiva.

[138] Curtin, op cit., pp. 106–7.

[139] See Melanie Klein, The Psycho-Analysis of Children, The International Psycho-Analytical Library, No. 27 (1937).

[140] Róheim, War, Crime, and the Covenant, pp. 137–38.

[141] Róheim, The Origin and Function of Culture, p. 50.

[142] Ibid., pp. 48–50.

[143] Ibid., p. 50. Compare the indestructibility of the Siberian shaman, drawing coals out of the fire with his bare hands and beating his legs with an ax.

[144] See Frazer’s discussion of the external soul, op cit., pp. 667–91.

[145] Ibid., p. 671.

[146] Pierce, Dreams and Personality, p. 298.

[147] “The Descent of the Sun,” in F. W. Bain, A Digit of the Moon (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1910), pp. 213–325.

[148] Róheim, The Eternal Ones of the Dream, p. 237. This talisman is the so-called tjurunga (or churinga) of the young man’s totem ancestor. The youth received another tjurunga at the time of his circumcision, representing his maternal totem ancestor. Still earlier, at the time of his birth, a protective tjurunga was placed in his cradle. The bull-roarer is a variety of tjurunga. “The tjurunga,” writes Dr. Róheim, “is a material double, and certain supernatural beings most intimately connected with the tjurunga in Central Australian belief are invisible doubles of the natives....Like the tjurunga, these supernaturals are called the arpuna mborka (other body) of the real human beings whom they protect” (ibid., p. 98).

[149] Book of Isaiah, 66:10–12.

[150] Ginzberg, op cit., vol. I, pp. 20, 26–30. See the extensive notes on the Messianic banquet in Ginzberg, vol. V, pp. 43–46.

[151] Dante, “Paradiso,” II, 1–9. Translation by Norton, op cit., vol. III, p. 10; by permission of the Houghton Mifflin Company, publishers.

[152] Ramāyāna, I, 45, Mahābhārata, I, 18, Matsya Purāṇa, 249–51, and many other texts. See Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, pp. 105 ff.

[153] Marco Pallis, Peaks and Lamas (4th edition; London: Cassell and Co., 1946), p. 324.

[154] Shri-Chakra-Sambhara Tantra, translated from the Tibetan by Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup, edited by Sir John Woodroffe (pseudonym Arthur Avalon), Volume VII of “Tantric Texts” (London, 1919), p. 41. “Should doubts arise as to the divinity of these visualized deities,” the text continues, “one should say, ‘This Goddess is only the recollection of the body,’ and remember that the Deities constitute the Path” (loc. cit.). See Tantra and Tantric Buddhism.

[155] Compare, e.g., C.G. Jung, “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious” (orig. 1934; Collected Works, vol. 9, part i; New York and London, 1959).

“There are perhaps many,” writes Dr. J.C. Flügel, “who would still retain the notion of a quasi-anthropomorphic Father-God as an extra-mental reality, even though the purely mental origin of such a God has become apparent” (The Psycho-Analytic Study of the Family, p. 236).

[156] “Paradiso,” XXXIII, 82 ff.

[157] See above.

[158] J.F. Stimson, The Legends of Maui and Tahaki (Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bulletin, No. 127; Honolulu, 1934), pp. 19–21.

[159] Bruno Meissner, “Ein altbabylonisches Fragment des Gilgamosepos,” Mitteilungen der vorderasiatischen Gesellschaft, VII, 1; Berlin, 1902, p. 9.

[160] See, for instance, the Katha Upaniṣad, 1: 21, 23–25.

[161] The above rendering is based on P. Jensen, Assyrisch-babylonische Mythen und Epen (Kellinschriftliche Bibliothek, VI, I; Berlin, 1900), pp. 116–273. The verses quoted appear on pp. 223, 251, 251–53. Jensen’s version is a line-for-line translation of the principal extant text, an Assyrian version from King Ashurbanipal’s library (668–626 b.c.). Fragments of the very much older Babylonian version and still more ancient Sumerian original (third millennium b.c.) have also been discovered and deciphered.

[162] Ko Hung (also known as Pao Pu Tzu), Nei P’ien, Chapter VII (translation quoted from Obed Simon Johnson, A Study of Chinese Alchemy, Shanghai, 1928, p. 63).

Ko Hung evolved several other very interesting receipts, one bestowing a body “buoyant and luxurious,” another the ability to walk on water. For a discussion of the place of Ko Hung in Chinese philosophy, see Alfred Forke, “Ko Hung, der Philosoph und Alchimist,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, XLI, 1–2 (Berlin, 1932), pp. 115–26.

[163] Herbert A. Giles, A Chinese Biographical Dictionary (London and Shanghai, 1898), p. 372.

[164] A Tantric aphorism.

[165] Lao Tze, Tao Teh Ching, 16 (translation by Dwight Goddard, Laotzu’s Tao and Wu Wei, New York, 1919, p. 18). Compare to the concept of Yin-Yang.

[166] “Paradiso,” XXXIII, 49–57 (translation by Norton, op cit., vol. III, pp. 253–54, by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, publishers).

[167] Kena Upaniṣad, 1:3 (translation by Swami Sharvananda; Sri Ramakrishna Math, Mylapore, Madras, 1932).

[168] Poetic Edda, “Hovamol,” 139 (translation by Henry Adams Bellows, The American-Scandinavian Foundation, New York, 1923).

[169] Jataka, Introduction, i, 75 (reprinted by permission of the publishers from Henry Clarke Warren, Buddhism in Translations [Harvard Oriental Series 3], Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1896, pp. 82–83).